Zero to 1 to million…..Scaling a nonprofit organization with minimum Resources
Having worked all my life in medium and large-scale businesses, building systems and platforms; I never thought that one day my skills would come in handy for a bustling nonprofit. Amid the covid outbreak, I got a call from Ramani Desaraju, about a site that she helped build along with a friend within a few days and needed my expertise to help scale it to the next level. The only caveat though was, we could not afford new resources and had to keep our tech cost as low as possible.
I would like to introduce you to getppe.org which started with the sole purpose of enabling volunteers to donate PPE equipment to hospitals in need across the US. The non-availability of PPE had a daunting impact on front-line workers and hospital staff. We wanted to solve this problem in the fastest and most efficient way possible.
The core functionality of getppe:
- Enable hospitals across the US to request PPE
- Help register volunteers who wanted to donate PPE
- Match volunteers to the nearest hospital to enable the donation of PPE
- Ensure PPE is donated to the hardest-hit areas (meaning zip codes with most covid cases)
Modus Operandi
A typical volunteer experience would be that they would enter their email, zip code, and PPE quantity and we gave them the nearest hospital which needed their assistance.
We had a list of 5K+ hospitals in need of PPE. We daily updated the list of hospitals in need of Volunteers who could register from any zip code and were immediately matched with the closest hospital. We also tracked the PPE demand across these hospitals and how much supply was available from volunteers. These were passionate volunteers who bought PPE and donated or in most cases prepared PPE in their homes (buying the raw material, stitching, etc.). Kudos to their spirit!
Connecting them to the closest place quickly to donate was important but in cases where the volunteer was close to the hardest-hit areas, we matched them to those hospitals. We relied on data from John Hopkins to get a list of zip codes where most covid cases were registered to determine the hardest-hit areas. Finally, if the volunteer was far away from any hospital needing PPE, we would send them shipping labels.
We hosted the site on WordPress. The first version worked on google sheets in the backend but it involved quite a bit of daily maintenance to ensure all the operational requirements were met. We soon realized that we need something more that helps us scale.
A quick snapshot of how we architected this for scale:
The current operations cost for running this platform is about $12–18 per month.
- Heroku — $7.00
- GoDaddy (Managed WordPress) — $10.00
“It takes a village to raise a child” ~ I would like to thank Jessica Choi, Ramani Desaraju who were part of this adventure. As we get close to 1million PPE donations, it shows the community spirit to come together during this unforeseen crisis.
About me:
My name is Kranthi Desaraju and I am Chief Technology Officer at getppe.org. You can reach me at kranthi.des@gmail.com or LinkedIn
