Anish Sinha, Jenny Cho, Mary Zhu | June 2024
*Develop for Good is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that supports teams of underserved and underrepresented college students as they build tech for nonprofits under industry mentorship. We accelerate the careers of the diverse tech leaders of tomorrow through hands-on projects with real-world impact. We’re on a mission to give every college student the opportunity to gain hands-on experience by solving problems for nonprofits with technology.*
At Develop for Good, a key aspect of our mission is to transform the nonprofit sector by providing vital college student-driven technical support to organizations in need. We operate in four-month project batches twice a year. Over the last 12 months, we engaged over 1,000 talented college student volunteers, over 200 industry professional volunteers, and nearly 100 nonprofit organizations. With the scale of our programs surpassing the manual capacity of our staff, we began developing Pantheon - a secure cloud platform built to scale our unique real-world tech project development program. The following is a short demo video of Pantheon’s user onboarding functionality:
A demo of Pantheon’s ability to import applications from our Airtable CRM to Google Workspace as new users
Before each cycle begins, our dedicated Program Director Amanda Lo diligently ensures that every volunteer is onboarded onto our communication platforms, including Slack and others, as an integral part of our project cycle initiation. However, this process is time-consuming, involving the manual addition of hundreds of volunteers individually onto our platforms.
Currently, Develop for Good serves 35-40 clients, and deploys over 400 volunteers every bi-annual cycle. With ambitions to broaden our impact and reach more clients, we, as engineers at Develop for Good, were compelled to rectify this issue through a unified management tool. And so, we honed in on the following overall research question:
<aside> 💡 With the scale of our programs surpassing the manual capacity of our staff, how might we manage program lifecycle tasks seamlessly and securely?
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Nonprofits have already been using a variety of platforms for volunteer management, with popular solutions including VolunteerHub, Bloomerang, and Point. However, none of these out-of-the-box products had the specific app integrations and project management features we need for our unique program, as they integrated poorly with our existing and working infrastructure.
Enter Pantheon, a tool we conceptualized a year ago and initiated in January of 2024. Our goal was clear: to develop a unified management platform for Develop for Good capable of handling all client lifecycle tasks seamlessly. From user management to data visualization to custom AI models, Pantheon was envisioned as the ultimate central hub for hosting and bridging data between disparate apps and services. As a starting tool, our top priority, as of now, is functionality.
Login page for Pantheon, Develop for Good’s management platform.
Enter Okta. Our partnership with Okta for Good was instrumental in facilitating access to a potent tool: Okta Workforce Federation. This workflow was straightforward. Upon a volunteer’s acceptance to a project cycle, they are added to an Airtable sheet. Afterwards, a lambda is triggered to create all volunteers in our Okta tenant’s universal directory. However, this plan fell short when we discovered that Single Sign-On (SSO) integration was an enterprise feature in platforms like Slack, Figma, and Notion. Despite our paid business or pro plans, we lack the resources for enterprise-level subscriptions, rendering our Okta-based solutions unviable. We were back at square one.
So far, the only volunteers issued Develop for Good handles (@developforgood.org) are Product Leads and management team members. However, the Google for Nonprofits plan allows up to 2,000 users. Although it can’t scale forever, we are hardly using a fifth of its total capacity. When we eventually reach this threshold, we could potentially pay for SSO capabilities for the essential services we rely on. Until then, we decided to build Pantheon around Google Workspace. This concept is simple: accept students, upload their information to Workspace (and issue then @developforgood.org emails), monitor the email allocations, and delete them at the end of each cycle to free up space in Workspace. This streamlined approach not only manages user accounts and their life cycles, but also ensures controlled access to services since every service we rely on has complimentary SSO for Google. With this plan in motion, we started building.