I'm not running a nonprofit, but I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies (along with a few research / technical businesses) and contribute to a blog about grant writing: http://www.seliger.com/blog
Most nonprofits are actually struggling with the same thing businesses are: How do they use resources effectively? How can they take in more cash than they spend? How can they decide what services to offer? Nonprofits are more like businesses than most people think: http://seliger.com/2012/09/02/why-nonprofits-are-more-like-b...
One key difference in many respects is that businesses have customers or clients while nonprofits' principle customers or clients are actually funders, rather than service recipients, and that can create some odd incentives and behavior.
Since I retired I lead a non profit [0] that aims at inventing medical tools like continuous glucose monitoring. We did not made any breakthrough, it is just engineering on paper with little PoC as there is little money. The inventions were published without IP claim, there are one or two downloads each week, but nobody contacted us.
This year we registered on HackaDay[1] for a early heart failure (HF) detector. Most aging adult suffers from HF, sometimes as early as when they are in their forties.
Our design is good, the gold standard here is the Physionet 2016 competition, Physionet 2016 competitors mostly used machine learning on file wide features such as the heart rate and its variability.
We choose to find features in heart sounds, there are up to four sounds per beat. The code is on Github.
The project on HaD will be declared finished in September or October.
We will have huge problems when we will reach the point of trying to obtain a regulator agreement (EC/FDA). It needs to make travels, provide samples, make clinical studies, rise awareness. Lot of problems that we are not equipped to manage.
If we succeed at this there are other R&D projects in the pipeline, to keep us busy.
Thanks for the kind message.
There are excellent teams doing Kaggle competitions. I tried last fall to make some students aware of Kaggle but they were not interested.
We did not try to raise funds, it was difficult when there was nothing concrete to show. But now we can show a simple app that can classify a heart sound as normal or not.
For example in [0] there is a ultra simple app (one button!) that classified my heart sounds as not normal, in less than one second.
I am thinking about making a kickstarter in December or next January to rise awareness about the detector and to raise some money.
I run Security First (https://www.secfirst.org). We are talking the issue of how to help make security learning and management easier for people at risk - NGOs, journalists, aid workers etc.
We've built a mobile app called Umbrella that puts best practice digital and physical security advice in the one place.
We also train and consult on various security issues for other organisations.
We are always looking for more help - technical, UI/UX, copywriting, dev (and funding of course).
Throw-away for various reasons, and probably not a non-profit in the traditional sense, but the nonprofit I run is a medical marijuana shop.
Struggling with the most is the industry in general. From banking, to landlords, to police, vendors, paying employees, and everything in between. It's a really interesting business full of awesome problems to tackle and there's never a dull moment, but it's definitely a challenge.
I'm CPO/CTO/CMO at GlobalGiving. I know there are other members of CTOs for Good lurking here (https://www.ctosforgood.org/), but I'll let them call themselves out.
It's tied into our business, but we've been using http://Impossible.org as a way to partner with charities + non-profits to give our businesses a "for purpose" angle and give back (while trying to find quality organizations that are already really, really good at what they do).
We're not running nonprofit but we provide our users an opportunity to support nonprofits of their choice and we in turn make a donation from a portion of the the purchase price to the selected charity organization at https://www.memobed.com
Most nonprofits are actually struggling with the same thing businesses are: How do they use resources effectively? How can they take in more cash than they spend? How can they decide what services to offer? Nonprofits are more like businesses than most people think: http://seliger.com/2012/09/02/why-nonprofits-are-more-like-b...
One key difference in many respects is that businesses have customers or clients while nonprofits' principle customers or clients are actually funders, rather than service recipients, and that can create some odd incentives and behavior.