Develop for Good Newsletter - Feb 2021
February '21 Update
Hi friends! 💌
A huge thank you to all volunteers, mentors, and executive team for a productive February. In this newsletter, we’ll provide you with some updates on where DFG is headed, case studies, volunteer spotlights, and recent mentor workshops.
Our Financial Future 📈
Over the past 11 months, DFG has grown faster and larger than we could have ever imagined, thanks to the overwhelming support from our community of volunteers, industry mentors, executive team, and board of advisors.
To help us continue to scale our impact in a sustainable way, we’ve worked with a few new clients this Winter cycle to incorporate small service fees to help us finance our operational expenses and ensure client engagement. We also plan to include service fees for new projects in future cycles, with some exceptions. Our services fees are a small fraction (~2%) of the real-world costs of these projects*, and are thoroughly discussed beforehand with each client based on the project’s complexity and the nonprofit’s budget/financial situation.
As a note, most of our projects (and all projects in previous cycles) have been completely pro bono. This information has been available on our website for some time, and we’re including more details below as to how we plan to maintain a sustainable not-for-profit model and where these funds are going.
100% of these collected fees go towards covering Develop for Good’s operational expenses (which have grown as our organization has scaled), including subscriptions for tools needed by volunteers, a CRM/Applicant Tracking System, legal services, financial and accounting services, PR services, limited stipends for first-generation/low-income students, and providing swag to show appreciation to volunteers.
We are actively committed to maintaining financial transparency, and our financial statement (IRS Form 990) will be made publicly available on our website when it is filed this summer. We will also make sure to a) include links to this information on future applications, b) evaluate whether charging clients small fees results in increased client engagement/better volunteer experience, c) aim to keep fees as low as possible as we grow our fundraising efforts.
By reinvesting these fees into our program, we hope to scale up our efforts to make greater amounts of impact and accelerate the digital transformation across the nonprofit sector.
If you have any questions about our model, please don’t hesitate to email volunteers@developforgood.org!
*Our research has shown that outsourced design projects traditionally cost $12,000-$100,000, web apps $20,000-$150,000, and native mobile apps $80,000-$250,000.
New Case Studies Are Up 🤗
Take a look at a few of our recently published Case Studies:
AARP: Personalized Chronic Health Nutrition App Design
The Develop for Good team designed an interactive prototype of a personalized nutrition app geared to the 50+ who have a chronic illness. The goal of the nutrition solution was to provide personalized meal plans based on dietary needs connected to health. Read their Case Study here.
Team: Isabel Wang (Stanford ‘22), Alex Luckerman (Vanderbilt ‘21), Haeli Baek (Stanford ‘21), Michelle Leung (Stanford ‘22), Tomasz Wiercioch (Brooklyn ‘20), Trisha Guttal (Cornell ‘22)
CARE: Water+ Dashboard and Data Visualization Project
The Develop for Good team created an interactive dashboard and map to intuitively visualize a database of humanitarian projects provided by CARE International’s Water team, whose portfolio encompasses multidisciplinary programming in over 50 countries. Read their Case Study here, or check out their live project here!
Team: Jane Boettcher (Stanford ‘21), Jack Boettcher (Harvard ‘21), Leonid Basevich (Brooklyn ‘20), Mai Anh Nguyen (Bryn Mawr College ‘23)
Amelior8: Platform Development: Allowing NGOs to Share Resources and Knowledge
The Develop for Good team created a platform that enables foundations to issue funds to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and receive real-time updates about their progress and impact. Read their Case Study here, or check out their live project here!
Team: Tran Le (Stanford ‘24), Anirudh Singh (Northeastern ‘21), George Zhuang (Cornell ‘23), Nisarg Dharia (MIT ‘23), Nishita Chintalapudi (USC ‘22), Susan Jang (Virginia ‘20)
Volunteer Spotlights 🌟
A section dedicated to recognizing and thanking our committed volunteers PMs, developers, and designers for donating their talents to our nonprofit clientele.
Meet Janine Bariuan, Electrical & Computer Engineering, UT Austin ‘21
“I’ve been a part of humanitarian projects at school utilizing the electrical engineering side of my major, but have never been able to find a way to use my SWE and design skills so Develop For Good really attracted for me that reason! I’m always trying to find ways to use my technical skills to help others directly!”
Meet Tim Nguyễn, Computer Science & Tech. Info. Management, UC Santa Cruz ‘21
“Growing up, I've always wanted to give back to my community and collaborate with others similarly passionate about social innovation and civic technology as I was! That's why I knew that I wanted to be apart of the Develop For Good community ever since I heard about it - I was so inspired to meet and network with so many other amazing college students who were invested in doing great work that actually benefited society and the world at-large!”
We will be posting more volunteer spotlights on our LinkedIn over the coming weeks.
Shout Out to our Industry Mentors 💪
This cycle, our generous sponsors at Amazon Web Services provided a week of programming and training for our volunteer students. We’d love to extend a huge thank you to the following individuals for sharing their knowledge and expertise:
Paid Opportunities for Social Good 💼
The Nature Conservancy - Web Developer
The Web Developer will be primarily responsible for supporting The Nature Conservancy’s global email program and participates in all functions of email development for TNC’s digital marketing and communications efforts worldwide. Apply on LinkedIn or PeopleSoft.
Other Tech for Social Good Events
The Fast Forward Academy: A series of 8 free classes taught by tech nonprofit leaders who are experts in fundraising, marketing, user research, and more.
Special Thanks to Our Philanthropic Sponsor 🙏
