Not-for-profit and social enterprise
Foundations, charities and social enterprises are a genuine thread through our work rather than one project we keep mentioning. We built the platform behind a regional emergency relief program, and we spent nearly a decade as the development team for an accredited social enterprise.
Tell us what you need builtCommunity Choice is the Foundation's emergency relief program for people in financial crisis across Geelong and the wider G21 region. Instead of handing over a parcel somebody else chose, people requiring assistance choose for themselves at a participating local venue. We built and still support the redemption platform that makes it work across a network of more than 25 community service agencies, and the reporting the Foundation needs to account for it. Read the Community Choice case study.
An accredited social enterprise running a national marketplace for surplus food. We were their development team from 2016 until the company wound up nearly a decade later. Over the platform's life Yume reported returning $30 million to Australian manufacturers and redistributing 11.5 million kilograms of food. Read the Yume Food case study.
Bicycle Network, The Community Grocer and Open Food Network have all been clients. Plenty of our work sits under agreements we cannot write about, so if you want to know whether we have built something like the thing you need, it is worth asking.
Grant funding does not stretch and it usually cannot be topped up mid-project. We do not publish a discount rate, because the more useful thing we can offer is help scoping down to what the funding actually covers rather than quoting the whole wish list and hoping. Cut features, not quality: a smaller thing built properly can be added to, and a large thing built badly has to be replaced.
If your funding obliges you to demonstrate reach, participation or distribution, that reporting has to be designed into the data model at the start. Trying to query it out afterwards is where organisations discover that the thing they have to prove was never recorded. It is the single most common avoidable problem we see in the sector.
Sector software rarely has one user group. Community Choice involves the Foundation, the agency network, the participating venues and the people receiving relief, all with different needs and very different levels of tolerance for friction. That is closer to marketplace work than to a simple internal tool, and it should be scoped that way.
This matters more here than anywhere else. A charity that cannot afford its own vendor is a charity whose program stops. The code, the IP, the infrastructure and the accounts are yours, in your name, and if you later move to an in-house team or another provider we help hand it over rather than holding onto it.
With strategy, which in a funded environment does double duty: it works out what should exist, and it produces a roadmap you can put in front of a funder or a board. You own that document whether or not you build it with us.
Then scoping, then a staged build, so something real is in front of people inside the funding period rather than at the end of it. If you are proving a concept before seeking larger funding, MVP builds is the relevant page, and what it costs to build an app in Australia has the numbers so you can write a realistic budget line.
Repeatedly, and it is a genuine thread through our work rather than one project we keep mentioning. We built and support Community Choice for the Give Where You Live Foundation. Yume Food, whose marketplace we built and maintained for nearly a decade, was an accredited social enterprise. Bicycle Network, The Community Grocer and Open Food Network have all been clients.
We do not publish a discount rate, because the honest version is more useful: we will help you scope down to what the funding actually covers instead of quoting the full thing and hoping. Cutting features rather than quality is how a constrained budget produces something that lasts, and we would rather build the smaller right thing.
By treating the acquittal as a requirement rather than an afterthought. If the funding requires you to demonstrate reach, participation or distribution, the reporting has to be designed into the data model at the start, not queried out of it later. Staged delivery also helps, because it puts something real in front of a funder inside the funding period.
You do, entirely. The code, the IP, the infrastructure and the accounts, in your name. This matters more in the sector than anywhere else, because a charity that cannot afford its own vendor is a charity whose program stops. If you later move to an in-house team or another provider, we help hand it over.