Helping smaller nonprofits afford the IT help they need

Well, yet another round of papers is done and out of the way.  I did a rather lackluster blurb about Gogo In-flight WiFi Service which, although it wasn't my best work, might come in handy for someone traveling this holiday season (especially if you're flying on American Airlines). 

The paper I enjoyed the most though, was Fundraising Analytics: What Nonprofit Organizations Can Learn from the Private Sector (yeah, I know, sounds thrilling).  This is the one that I'm hoping to refine and turn into something more substantial, and see if I can get it published.  Anyway, my basic premise is that nonprofits are behind the curve on using data mining to it's fullest extent, and text mining might be the next big thing.  I can picture taking all those reactive research reports and dumping them into a data warehouse, and just culling through it all (along with collected news articles and contact reports) for connections.

I'm putting together a quick and dirty powerpoint for my database prof to share some ideas I have about what can do in the future to improve the product we have, and make it more analytic-ready.  Mainly, I'm going to focus on what smaller nonprofits can do to mine the information they already have, without access to the tools that larger organizations have.  For instance, we've been using Tableau to aid visualization, but considering it's limitations, I was shocked when I checked into buying the full version.

(my reaction to their insane pricing)

So, my goal during this break is to look into what options a smaller nonprofit might have to reap the benefits.  I know there are macros for excel already out there that will do regression models, so if I find ones that are free I might start throwing that together with some other basic things (I know the newest version of excel  has a few rudimentary visualization tools for data mining so I'll see if that does what I'm envisioning), and if need be, making my own free tool.  It'll be a far cry from a CRM, but it'll be something.  It needs to be easy enough so that any person without a background in this stuff can just toss in the data, click a button, and get ready-to-use findings back, with possibly some charts to help sell the idea to the management-types.  I'll also check out the offerings already out there for open source things, and see what can be done.  

I have an uncle that runs a battered women's shelter in a fairly rural place.  He needs a quick and easy way to browse grants, to organize contacts, and to find interested donors.  He shouldn't have to spend lots of money to get this done; their funds are better spent on their primary mission.  Uh oh, I'm sensing some scope creep...but honestly, this is the stuff that I'm passionate about, and I'll do what it takes.