Case Studies > Matching (and Maximizing) Resources

A long time consultant to the nonprofit community had the goal of fostering mentorship and resource sharing between nonprofit professionals. After spending many years working with nonprofit organizations, the consultant saw there were numerous opportunities for professionals to share their knowledge and skill sets.

The consultant saw the problem first hand at a local food bank.  Established community food banks had tremendous knowledge about starting and operating a food bank, but that knowledge wasn't shared adequately or efficiently.  The consultant envisioned a platform that could connect nonprofit professionals to help them share skills and facilitate knowledge transfer across the sector.

The consultant contacted Annkissam about developing an initial prototype resource matching platform. The platform was developed with Drupal and allowed nonprofit professionals to list their skills and interest in becoming a mentor or mentee. Users were then able to contact each other to set up mentoring relationships. This allowed for nonprofit professionals to find other professionals who had the skills, interest and time to guide them in their particular areas of interest.

Annkissam was able to deliver several benefits to the consultant by building the system with Drupal. First, the cost of the prototype system was kept low since the system was developed with an open-source technology. This technology provided significant out-of-the-box functionality, which meant there was no cost for custom coding. This was important for the consultant who was bootstrapping the entire project himself.

The system also needed to quickly evolve to fit the changing requirements of the user community. Since the system required little to no custom code development or programming, Annkissam was able to implement functional changes rapidly after the system had launched.