Software Proposal Document
Team Members
Carl Nunes
Lam Mai
Rohit Kumar
Proposal: Donation Management System
Non profit organizations play an important part in the betterment of societies. The projects that are implemented by these organizations have a positive impact on several sectors, such as social, educational, moral and vocational of a society. We have realized the value of not- for- profit organizations, and we recognize that in order for these organizations to carry out their functions properly and effectively they depend on their donors. The donors not only want results for the funds donated, but also look for accountability on the part of these organizations. One of our clients, a church in Vietnam, uses the donated funds to build schools and provide subsidized education for the destitute. But the church is plagued by various problems which mainly result from a manual system for tracking donations. It was clear to us, that in order to solve these problems we needed to find or develop a donation management system. Upon conducting a search on the internet we found several donation management systems that share three attributes; first they are proprietary and must be bought; second they seem to have no support for different languages; and third these are not easily customizable. Therefore, we propose to build a stand alone windows- based donation management system, which will be available to non profit organizations under the open source license for free. Our system will provide additional features, such as multi language support, which are not available on other proprietary systems. Our software will be supported by up-to-date documentation which will allow developers to customize the software according to an organization’s needs, making it attractive for organizations to deploy.
Our software will in particular enable the employees of the organization to do the following tasks.
· Create and edit donor profiles
· Keep track of each donors payment amount (donation history)
· Create events for gathering funds
· Generate reports for donors and managers of the organization
· Create 2D charts to track progress of funds for any month.
· Search for donors using various search criteria
· Send emails to donors, to thank them for their contribution and remind them of fund raisers.
· Use different categories for individuals and companies to make the collection of information and viewing of donations easier.
· Provide multi language support.
The links to some of the software packages we looked at are provided below.
http://www.donorexpress.com/screenshots.htm
The system we develop will provide organizations with an easy and efficient way of tracking donations, which we believe the other systems lack. In addition to this advantage an important trait of open source software is that organizations will be able to customize it at minimum cost, which will make the system cost effective to implement. We believe that by automating the process of donation collection and use, organizations will be able to concentrate solely on their core business practices, which in turn will increase their productivity. Besides, the automated system will help them to properly account for the donations received and provide up-to-date reports to the donors.