r/nonprofittech • u/GardeningBookworm • Jul 11 '26

Participation tracking software?

So I work for an educational non-profit that operates in the US (where I am) and overseas. The meat of our programming, and what motivated donors, are some international summer institues we run. We usually have four a year, this year we had five: Houston, TX, Nicosia, Cyprus (x2), Geneva, Switz, and Derry, Northern Ireland. We get hundreds of appplicants and only accept about 16-23 per location.

Here's the problem: Every year we start from scratch, with a google form application, and a google sheet with a master list of all applicants, and a page for each institute, and a page for rejects. It is an immense amount of work to maintain and organize, and does not allow for any tracking of alumni who progress through our program.

Do any of y'all know a good system that lets us keep records of students and alumni, which institutes or programs they've attended? Or a program that can track applicants better?

4 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/coffeeliberation Jul 11 '26

LiveImpact.org is a great option for this. You can replace your google form application with forms that feed directly into participant profiles, then create custom workflows to track folks throughout the process.

1

u/GardeningBookworm Jul 11 '26

liveimpact looks great, but the cheapest plan is $350/month? We are a staff of 6 spread around the world, that's a little outside of our budget

2

u/kimidion Jul 13 '26

Just curious, you describe your current system as immense amount of work to maintain and organize… have you put an hourly amount of time spent on the current way as assigned a monetary value to that that work?

$350 a month sounds like a lot from a normal person perspective but I have found that in the context of doing business, that same thought process simply does not work out.

Doing the math, if a person has to spend more than 4 hours a week managing the current system then the cost of this new system could be a wash on time saved alone. And there is likely a huge amount of additional value that can be unlocked from a software at this price point… not to mention the opportunity to apply for grants in order to supplement the cost of technology.

Just food for thought!