Forum Discussion
Build It Yourself? Part 1: A Proportionate Architecture
How can a smaller nonprofit organisation centralise data for people who haven't been hired yet, working in departments that don't exist yet, doing work that no one has thought of yet? Here’s the arc...
I like the focus on keeping the architecture proportionate to the organisation’s actual size and capacity. For smaller nonprofits, centralising data is only useful if the people maintaining it can also manage permissions, security, and future changes without creating another layer of complexity. The point about siloed spreadsheets is especially important. Sometimes the “simple” setup is actually the harder system to govern. Where an external service or API is needed, something like the Nonprofit Check Plus API could sit at the edge of the architecture rather than becoming another system to maintain. That kind of approach keeps the core setup relatively simple while still allowing for automation where it makes sense