Hey guys, I wanted to get some recommendations from you guys because there is such a wide range of expertise. I've moved on from Fortune 10 UX work and have ventured into the world of non-profits/charity work. We have an existing site but the cost is enormous for the actual amount of use we get out of it. My idea is to create a competitor inhouse for substantially less. We would obviously have to hire a real admin to maintain it in the future, but for now I can get a proof of concept up and test it out.

 

Let me describe the use case.

 

We are a charity/non-profit that does disaster case management. So we help manage and assist people involved in FEMA disasters with their ongoing needs and living expenses. We get money from all over and we also need to report where we spend it. On that note, we do not want to spend money on anything except for hosting and maybe an admin moving forward. We want the ability to change things in an ongoing process. I would like to use all open source software.

 

We have 40-50 disaster case managers. They have to logon to a site that is hosted. The only public facing part of this is the logon. After they logon they can create or search for a client. Then there is quite a bit of information about the clients including personal details, notes, lots of different records. There will need to be a contact log and ongoing case management information that will need to be updated for a long period of time. There needs to be quite a few different kinds of reports that we have to give FEMA and other interested/grant giving entities. All in all there will be less than 100k records or so, all inclusive. There will need to be roles of course for adding new case managers, for admins to edit client records, etc.

 

 

I'm going to run this in a docker on my Unraid box to begin with. As a first go at it, I was thinking about something like SuiteCRM or Viper and just cutting out all of the modules that we don't need. I was checking out Strapi, it seems to be all inclusive and have everything we need. We really need an easy to use UI because some of our case managers are not very computer fluent.

 

am I thinking in the right direction?

 

Bonus points if you know of a docker I can download and start to configure.

 

 

 

 

Small update. I tried out Strapi and it completely is the wrong tool for this. It was mainly built around APIs. I'm trying Odoo now.

Odoo is ok, but it would require an intense amount of customization.

 

I'm trying https://cortezaproject.org/ and it seems solid. I really want to mimic the visual builder aspect of Quickbase. To make easy forms that people can use to submit things.

I've found some competitors that do what we need, but they are extremely expensive.

https://www.socialsolutions.com/solutions/case-management/ sells Apricot, which is a case management platform that goes for $150k.

 

Now that I've gotten into the charity world, I'm starting to see where all these sky high operating costs are coming from. The people that make these software decisions are not the people that might have the experience to make the best judgement call. 

 

I'm currently weighing between setting up Corteza and just making a simple html/database site. There has to be a simple visual editor .. like a scaled down phpmyadmin that you can set up to allow someone to go directly into a record and add details. I'm trying to think of a database manager that I saw many moons ago, but can't at the moment.