Vision of the Platform

What is the larger purpose of the Platform?

The larger purpose of the FundImpact is to empower organizations in addressing the transparency and accountability with regards to Statuary compliances, Donor Awareness and Internal Audits. It enables organizations to take data driven decision making and measure the impact it is delivering.

FundImpact provides off-the shelf features that are easy to implement and serves the basic needs of the NGOs (i.e. tracking funding from Donors/Funders and tagging very high level activities (milestones) against it.

How will the platform be positioned as compared to bespoke platforms offering similar functionality with freemium models?

The core philosophy of the platform is to provide free and opensource solution that is highly modular and extensible. The organizations can use the base platform and extend the functionality tailor made to their requirements and workflow.

The vision is not force fit a particular workflow or data structure of the freemium solutions in the market but to facilitate organization with core set of tools that can be further extended to a project management tool, leads management, survey tool, impact assessment, etc.

Will it be a complete package of ERP for NPOs?

The platform has a very specific purpose to help organizations keep track of funding from donors and measure activities against a set of impact indicators. The platform will be extensible enough to plug into other solutions or applications through APIs to perform workflow driven data entry operations or reporting. (For, example, integration with Project Management tool to keep track of Project Activities, Integration with Billing Apps to keep tracks of accounting)

Accounting

How do we address different accounting practices to track funds?

FundImpact will be shipped with Minimal Viable Features with regards to management of Funds. We are tracking funding support at an aggregate level and not at granular level for each bill or expense. It will give a snapshot for three main indicators – Funds Committed by donors, Funds received by organization and Funds Utilized by the organization for each project/portfolio.

For accounting purposes, it is best that the organization sticks to its accounting packages and use its APIs to integrate the FundImpact and fetch relevant data points.

Is it going to be an accounting software?

No, FundImpact is not intended to be an Accounting package. It is helping organizations (specially project managers and fund managers) keep track of the current status of the projects undertaken by the organization by reporting Fund and Activity status.

Will it integrate with accounting packages like Tally?

Yes, the platform will be designed to fetch relevant data points from 3rd party applications. As of now, we haven’t thought of providing off the shelf support to any of these accounting packages.

How will it help the accounts department? They already have a financial tools in place and extensively use Excel or Tally for their work.

The platform is intended to facilitate better communication between accounts/finance department and rest of the team in the organization. The accounts personnel can upload audited/approved numbers of funds to the platform. The same can be accessed/tracked by the other team members through project dashboards.

The platform is not designed to provide features for accounting workflows (like double entry system or approvals/audits of payments/funds or budgeting). These operations can be continued on the existing tools (like Excel, Tally)

Project Management

How will the platform serve the difference management practices and approaches in the organization?

FundImpact is not designed to be used a project management tool. The product will be shipped with Minimal Viable Features to track project deliverables as committed in the MoU or against funds allocated.

The project managers can use any of the 3rd party applications outside the FundImpact to assign tasks to team members and time track their deliverables.

Is it a project management Tool?

FundImpact captures and tracks the project deliverables and not individual members tasks. It is therefore not designed to be used as a Project Management Tool for managers to oversee implementation of a plan or deliverables of the individual team members. It is more like tracker for high level project deliverables (like activities committed under the MoU)

The platform will give a high level dashboard of various projects categorized under different portfolios (Workspaces) for the managers and team members to review/track where the projects are heading. They can get a high level view of target vs actual on Funding and Committed Activities.

Will it be a reporting tool?

In a very broad sense, the FundImpact platform can be used a reporting tool to display high level indicators for the project (e.g. No of centres established, No of training camps organized, Funds received till date, Funds utilized till date, etc)

The dashboards will generate relevant reports at four Levels – Deliverable Card (group of time bound activities), Project, Workspaces (Portfolio) and at organization level.

Can this be used as a survey tool? Who will enter project data on the tool?

The FundImpact is not designed to capture survey data or enter granual details for a project activities. It is intended for the project managers to enter the aggregated details of the project activities (the target deliverables of the project, like no. of health camps organized).

Will this act like a document repository for the projects?

The FundImpact captures the high level indicators of a project for tracking purpose. It is not intended to be used as document repository for various projects in the organization. Although we can upload attachments as reference documents.

Will this tool serve like a contracts management for the organization? (Managing and monitoring contracts/MoU)?

Contracts management is workflow driven application which requires custom logic and approach to manage various leads and prospect projects. The FundImpact is not intended to be used for prospecting projects or donors.

Impact Measurement

How will we measure impact?

The high level indicators captured through activities (deliverables) gives us primary data to evaluate impact of a particular project or activity. The organization can tag multiple indicators to such activities as probable outcomes/impact. For, example a project activity of “Organizing  WASH campaigns” can be tagged with the impact indicator of health, school education.

This way organization is able to keep track of various impact areas it is able to work on and are measured through (target values of activities and allocation of funds.) For example, Dashboard will give an overall figure to the organization like “Investments influencing child health”, “No. of villages where SDG4 was addressed”.

In our approach, Impact Measurement should be taken as portfolio management across most common indicators of various projects.

What impact framework will we be using? Can the organization create their own?

The FundImpact doesn’t propose any impact framework. Rather it supports capturing of primary data and categorizing the data into relevant form before the organization can process it using any of the impact frameworks. The FundImpact facilitates the aggregation and structuring of the data as per organization’s strategy and requirements by allowing them to categorize/tag project activities into attributable impact indicator.