Carr Systems Incorporated
Technology solutions for your business problems
Open Source Impacting the Third Sector
Challenge:
The Social Impact Exchange's mission is to align funders with nonprofits that demonstrate the greatest impact on their communities. SIE's founder, Alex Rossides, envisioned 'an exchange' that would track and report clear performance metrics, which in turn would drive greater efficiency in nonprofit funding decisions for corporations, foundations, and high net worth donors. SIE's mission sits at the crossroads of the nonprofit and financial services industries. The task is ambitious, and it requires flexible technology that will not only deliver a terrific user experience to site visitors, but that will also grow with SIE as the organization takes off.
Solution:
We recommended a Drupal-based solution for our friends at the Social Impact Exchange. The website application that they envisioned is really several websites in one. It includes public-facing reports and search tools, internal operational management tools, and business plan competition site where nonprofits come together and compete for funding. Drupal enabled us to start with a pre-built application framework and CMS, allowing us to spend our time - and the customer's dollar - modifying Drupal modules and adding custom modules to produce the desired user experience on all levels.
Outcome:
The result is an attractive, highly functional system that serves many purposed for the Exchange. Open Source was definitely the right choice, saving time and money while allowing us to focus development time where it was needed most. We are happy to report that the Social Impact Exchange is garnering lots of attention and support for its mission, and we hope to remain their technology partner as they continue to grow and impact the third sector.
