Small Community Non Profit

Definition:

An organization with 1-5 principles that either volunteer or exist off of grants, donations, and or small amount of commerce

Often these organizations have a supporting community that has an interest in, or is affiliated with, the mission goals. Otherwise known as "Stakeholders" or "Interested Parties".

The supporting community is frequently asked to provide volunteer effort and this is often enthusiastically engaged in.

In many organizations with limited financial resources, the volunteers are asked to take up an increased amount of workload thereby increasing tensions within the support network.

Since volunteers are not immediately responsive, there is often an impact from the delay between recognizing a need and having the human power to address it.

Invariably, important tasks are not accomplished faster than they appear which tends to erode the community spirit and forces leadership into a 'crisis management' mode of operating.

Especially in organizations with one charismatic leader, the deadlines and consequences fall upon their shoulders alone, making for a very uncomfortable lifestyle and reduced ability to be effective.

The Need:

Task management is the responsibility of a small number of people and volunteers will polarize into groups that are dedicated and those who care a great deal but lack the time and effort that they are being asked to provide.

Community members will have a variable amount of time per week within which they are capable of performing one or a few well defined minor tasks that can assemble into larger accomplishments.

The Solution

Technology
Database elements: system identifier, goal/task title, description, severity (1-10), time due, time start, time stopped, time entered, description, URL, media connection, member alert status code (used for broadcast conditions). An electronic interface that allows a member or Organization Director to intuitively create a goal and optionally attach a time estimate for completion. This occurs on phone, computer, tablet etc. The first few entries (higher level tasks) or "Goals" will not likely have an estimated time provided, but will display the cumulative estimates for all sub tasks. Whomever is creating the task, can easily create sub-tasks that will then need to be accomplished. These should have a time estimate attached. Volunteers can then interact with the task list in a few ways:

• View a list of tasks ordered in rank of time estimate (Least to most)
• View a hierarchical tree of Tasks and Goals with 'accomplished' and 'underway' indicators.
• Provide an estimate of your available time and view tasks according to this limitation.
• Begin accomplishing a longer task, but create sub-tasks when unable to complete the entire entity.

Notifications:
Each goal or task may optionally have a 'due date' and a 'severity'. Goals and tasks that have not yet been accomplished and are approaching a due date can be configured to alert users in a variety of ways:

• Members may set their level of preferred disturbance (e.g. alert me when severe tasks are overdue, or alert me when medium severe tasks change to become severe)
• As a task reaches it's due date it can be sent to a widening circle of people for accomplishment.
• Each member whether able to respond or not will be motivated to create sub-tasks that become an instruction set for accomplishing the goal.
• Feedback about each task accomplishment can be used to quickly refine the instruction set.
• In this way even novice volunteers can benefit from the experience of others and accomplish complex goals.
• More experienced, expert or capable volunteers without the actual time to perform the tasks can provide benefit by sharing wisdom.
• Ubiquitous feedback within the system, alerts others to the goal achiever and the person who provided instruction. This promotes group recognition as well as motivating instruction givers to accomplish tasks rather than write out instructions. At a certain point is is easier to do it than to describe.

Interface
Phone Based:

• time slider, single motion that selects the time allotment being searched
• tree menus of remaining goals and tasks / title color reflects completion (click to view, double click to expand tree branch)
• list of priority or deadline based tasks
  • single click selects - if no other action taken, timer begins
  • R-swipe opens [edit] [sub-task] dialog
    1. [edit] shows text window, severity slider, due-date chooser, send button (send to other member) and [Save]
    2. [sub-task] shows "Parent:" then parent Name above text window, severity slider etc.
  • L-swipe opens [Delete] dialog (Deleted tasks show ~strikethrough~ but remain in system)
  • Touch-Hold-Drag - reorders the tasks into priority

Tablet Based: Same as Phone with the addition of:

• Map view by default
• Information Tiles that may be assigned to different Template Areas
• Statistical View of project and Project Members
• (Trace Messaging from within the system ?) (Mailchimp?)(GNU List?)(Wiki?)
• More detailed Notes section with multimedia viewing
• Document Link Section (Evernote, Web RPC, Dropbox etc.)

Computer Based: Same as Tablet with the addition of:

• More detailed overview
• More comprehensive calendar display
• Mouse Optimized interface elements
• Administration and Configuration Dashboard