Non-Profit Tech Blog

So I’m watching a co-worker fax documents hour after hour to other nonprofits. She works for our eviction prevention unit. That unit is responsible for serving 700 clients with emergency rental assistance. It’s a one-shot deal that allows people to avoid the shelter system here in New York by paying their rental arrears. However, in order to pay for people’s rent, my org has to fax our nonprofit partners with case management files just to see if they can pay our client’s rental arrears.

Ok, so you’d think the easy answer is… why not e-mail the document to them? They do. However, not all nonprofits have Internet access even in this day and age. Ok, so you think, there’s got to be a better way. Let’s set up a fax server and a document management system to watch over all these documents. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Heavy iron, new hardware, more IT toys. There’s some truth to this conventional solution. It’s probably a solution that we’ll be implementing anyway. However, it’s a longer-term solution dependent on larger capital funding. What can be done now? It looks like this IT guy is going to have to convince people of the necessity for Internet access for these smaller nonprofits.

However, the volume of faxing is probably asymmetric. That is, my org probably faxes a lot more than the smaller partners. For them, faxing is probably not the chore it is for us. Are there any goodies I can produce that will get them to REALLY want to get Internet access. Aha! So I’m thinking salesforce.com. What? You ask? How does salesforce.com enter into this equation? For that, we need to think about SaaS and what it really means and what’s in those faxes anyway?

I’m looking at the fax. They’re case files, that is, papers containing the whys and wherefores of how this client became in danger of being homeless and supporting documentation about how they were denied an application by the local city agency in charge of rental assistance. Fifty page case files are the norm. However, looking at the files, I see lots of structured data. Data that can be represented as fields. Fields that can show up in a salesforce.com implementation. That’s right, I’m building a case management system in salesforce.com. So… this means I can offer my fellow nonprofits a chance to interact with me in a meaningful way through data interchange. And because they can get their own copy of Salesforce.com, we can have two open systems talking to one another. Isn’t that really what faxing is all about? And in the process, they help themselves. We’ll probably ask these nonprofits to not only get Internet access but sign up for salesforce.com as well. Talk about market penetration on their part. I could never ask other nonprofits to do, say a Raiser’s Edge deployment just for solving my org’s problems. Sigh. Yet another lost opportunity for Blackbaud. At some point, this is all going to pile up and they’ll end up in a limited market while salesforce.com and its ecosystem gobble up nonprofit after nonprofit in precisely the manner I’m considering.

So that’s the quick and dirty vision of the eviction prevention application I’m building. I’m wondering though, does anyone out there want to volunteer for my org so they can get some experience building a Salesforce app too? If you’re interested, e-mail me at abenamer [at] nonprofittechblog.org.