Our story

Edward Wu founded BI For Nonprofits in 2011. During his time as the Technology Manager at KOMAZA, a social enterprise in Coastal Kenya, Edward noticed that one of the biggest issues that seem to face a number of nonprofit social enterprises were business decisions driven by poorly collected data and ill-defined operations metrics, which led to decisions that were ill advised and costly financially.

It was this shortfall that inspired him to create a business intelligence software suite geared towards the needs of nonprofit social enterprises, an idea he was able to successfully fund via Kickstarter. But as he begun to develop the software, Edward realized that many nonprofit social enterprises might also need someone to help them select an appropriate technological solution to meet their M&E needs and to set-up, integrate & maintain the solution once its been selected.

Before starting BI For Nonprofits, Edward spent over five years at Comcast as a key contributor in the development of the Comcast NE&TO Product Engineering Dashboard website. He worked closely with companies such as Motorola, Cisco, Active Broadband Networks (ABN), HP, Vertica, Oracle and others to develop methodologies to collect datasets and architect servers & databases/data warehouses to store and analyze the datasets, which would be terabytes in size.

When you work with BI For Nonprofits, you work with developers with experience developing technological solutions in the public, private and voluntary sector. Our developers come from organizations such as Developers For Good, a community of technologists who use their skills to make the world a better place.

Our philosophy

A 2010 HBS Working Paper entitled A Contingency Framework for Measuring Social Performance highlights the fact that organizations in the social sector need to demonstrate their impact because the one main drivers of social change globally, funders, are requiring it. Despite this need to demonstrate impact an April 2012 NTEN survey, The State of Nonprofits Data , shows that fewer than 66% of respondents are measuring information about their programs and 50% are tracking their programs’ outcomes.

The 4 main reasons why nonprofit social enterprises have a hard time monitoring the impact of their programs are: issues relation to collecting & working with data (27%), lack of expertise (24%), issues of time & prioritization (22%) and challenges with technology (23%) ( Source: NTEN The State of Nonprofits Data, April 2012). BI For Nonprofits was founded to help nonprofit social enterprises overcome these challenges. We can help you identify the metrics that best relay the impact of you programs and develop bespoke software solutions to collect, process and display the data. All hosted on a cloud-based platform which can also be use to meet any other IT needs you might have at no additional cost.