Revisiting How the Nonprofit Planner Fits Into My Theme

As I get deep in an actual web application, like the Nonprofit Planner and Grant Generator, it is easy to lose track of what my overall goal is with this blog and my book "The Shape of Knowledge".

My main message is, and has been, that there are basic knowledge patterns that capture important types of reasoning. The pattern I am elaborating on here is a Composer, which captures content once and then configures and reconfigures it into various documents to meet a particular need.

The value of identifying these patterns is that a talented developer, like my partner Steve, can write a powerful program that consumes predefined knowledge artifacts created by domain experts and then generates a web app automatically based on that knowledge. I call this type of program an application generator, or an 'apperator', for short.

At the same time, the identification of knowledge patterns empowers us, the knowledge authors who create the knowledge artifacts, because we can use these 'apperator' programs to build our own custom solutions without writing code.

In this particular case, I built a template using KnowtShare (our online collaboration tool), and made it available to charities for developing and documenting their business plans. The shape of that template, and therefore all plans created using it, is a hierarchical tree model. I call this shape a 'triangle' because it grows from a single root to the many 'leaves' of the tree. This tree/triangle is the knowledge artifact that stores the raw material for the Grant Composer. Each charity will create and maintain its own business plan.

There is a second artifact required, and it is built and maintained by me, as a community resource. That is a table -- a 'square' -- containing the information requirements for particular foundations.

The 'apperator' Steve has written is a Composer that knows how to consume these two types of artifacts: a hierarchical KnowtShare file filled with written information items and a .csv file that contains a matrix of communication targets (foundations) and their preferred order for those information items. Context questions are used to identify which branches of the tree and which rows of the table to use when creating a solution at run-time.

I, as the knowledge author, decided to use business plan information to populate a grant application for foundations, so the actual app that is created is a Grant Application Generator. But the same pattern could be used to collect an individual's CV and generate a customized resume for a particular company -- that would be a Resume Generator. Or a student's transcript and essay questions to generate a customized college application -- that would be a College Application Generator. This makes sense: these examples are very similar to the Grant Generator.

What about something further afield? There's a whole industry evolving around using legal boilerplate and context questions to generate legal documents. The Composer pattern could be used to achieve the same results, and with far less programming.

My last post was dedicated to describing how the very same business planning information used in grant applications can be used to generate other reports and marketing materials. All of these are examples of the Composer Pattern and can be created by the same aperator with only minor tweaks.

The Composer is just one pattern. I have written about the Recommender pattern and the Scoring pattern as well, and I will be describing others going forward.

The challenge, and the opportunity, come from thinking about problem solving at a higher level of abstraction than we normally do.

Most applications are built to solve a particular problem. The IT team interviews their customers to determine the functional specifications for an application they want built. Then the IT people go off and build it, checking back in periodically with the customers to make sure they're still on track.

Typically there is a deadline looming, and everyone is focused on the problem at hand. No one is interested in investing time (and money) in designing a meta solution that will make the next problem easier to solve. In fact, if programming is paid for on an hourly basis, there is a disincentive to look for the patterns that will make application development more efficient. But as knowledge authors, and as problem solvers in general, there are many benefits to identifying and harnessing new patterns.

Knowledge patterns only become visible when you are exposed to many different but similar problems, and when you look for them. It also helps to have a vocabulary and a mental framework that make it easier to discuss the patterns you sense are emerging. My goal is to contribute to the creation of those foundational tools, and to create real world examples that will stimulate discussion.

Other Nonprofit Composer Opportunities

The first Composer we are building for the NPO (Nonprofit) Network, which is what I am now calling the website I want to build, is a Grant Application Generator. My last posts have been dedicated to chronicling the process I went through to design this Grant Composer. But the Strategic Planning information that we collect with the NPO Planner has value far beyond grant applications.

The NPO Business Plan has strategic information, such as the organization's purpose, mission statement and strategy. It has high level financial data. It also has program information, such as program descriptions, volunteer information and even stories that can be used to 'sell' the program to potential donors and partners. These types of information can serve as high quality raw material for many different communication pieces.

The role of a Composer is to configure information, stored in what can be thought of as an 'information catalog', into a form that meets a particular set of needs. The Grant Application Generator configures business plan information into a grant application that meets the submission requirements of a particular foundation. The same raw material could be configured to create reports for Board members, handouts for volunteers, brochures for potential donors, even public websites.

The current business plan model contains only text and numbers, but it will be expanded to include images. This extension is important, because visuals are essential in certain media, such as brochures and websites.

Professional templates will be developed for different communication vehicles, with much more extensive formatting than the Grant Generator, which is designed to replicate a completed questionnaire. Often the content of the Grant Generator is cut-and-pasted into an online form, so the main goal of its formatting is simplicity and clarity, not beauty. The formatting of Composers for printed documents, especially marketing documents, will strive for professionalism and attractiveness.

Once templates are created, we will create context dialogues that ask for important parameters, such as which program should be featured in the communication piece. The Composer will know, based on the template, whether the long or short form of the answer is most appropriate.

Ultimately, the Composer will manage the selection and placement of text and images into the appropriate template, based on the information collected in the context dialogue.

The creation of additional Composers will extend the value of the Business Plan content, and save even more time for chronically time-poor nonprofits. It will make available a growing portfolio of communication documents that nonprofits can use to get the word out about the services they provide. The availability of these documents will help in the recruitment of volunteers and donors, and improve the understanding of stakeholders like the Board of Directors and community partners.

Composers provide document automation, and like all automation tools, they free-up people to focus on the tasks that only people can do. In this case, that task is the crafting of the message. The mechanics of document assembly will be left to the computer.

One More Input to the Nonprofit Planning System

I said in the prior post that two knowledge artifacts are required to run the Grant Generator: the Business Plan Tree, which provides the content, and the Foundation Sequencing Table, which provides the assembly instructions. There is one other input, a community asset that I build and maintain along with the Sequencing Table, which I call the Nonprofit Element Attribute table.

In the process of building the Nonprofit Planner and Grant Generator, there were certain design and formatting decisions that were left to me as the knowledge author. One was the rules for when to use the green 'completeness' highlighting in the business plan, and the other was how to format the output in the grant application.

First, I'll explain the completeness rules. Remember, in KnowtPlan, when an item is completed it is outlined in green in the note view and highlighted in green in the outline view.

The rule for when to apply the highlighting to the 'leaves' of the tree is simple: when both the short and long answer are filled in, add the green outline. So the completeness rule for 'Organization's Mission Statement' is 'self'; it is highlighted as soon as its 'self' is complete.

The rules for how to roll the highlighting up to higher levels in the tree are somewhat more complicated. That is because some of the higher level notes require their own answers and some are just headers added for organization purposes.

An example of a note that is just a header is 'SWOT Analysis'. It has no content; if you clicked on it, you would not get a popup window asking for a long and short answer. So its completeness rule is 'children'; it is highlighted as soon as all of its children are highlighted. In the screenshot above, SWOT is not highlighted because two of its attached notes have not been filled in yet.

On the other hand, 'Organization's Purpose' is a note that acts as a header but also requires its own content. The charity is expected to fill in the organization's purpose, which should be short and compelling - different from a mission statement, which can be rather wordy. So the completeness rule for 'Organization's Purpose' is 'both': it is considered complete when all of its children are completed AND its own content is filled in.

So one piece of information I have to provide is the completeness rule for every item in the plan. I do this by adding an attribute called 'completeness' and setting its value to 'self', 'children' or 'both'. A second attribute I need to provide for each item is how it should be formatted in the grant application that is generated. This is similar to assigning a paragraph style in Microsoft Word.

Even though we ask for a 'long' and 'short' answer for each question, it is clear from working with the actual content that some answers tend to be much longer than others. For example, contact info tends to be very short. Descriptions of the Board members, on the other hand, tend to be much longer.

So we created two different paragraph styles: 'inline' puts the question header on the same line as the response pulled from the business plan; 'paragraph' puts the header on a separate line. There are also headers, the ones that have no content of their own, that never show up in the generated grant application. Their style is set to 'none'. This became a second attribute.

I'm sure there will be other attributes that will surface as we continue to develop the Nonprofit system. To make it easy to expand and maintain this sort of information, we capture it in a table that is easy for me to change, and doesn't require changes in computer code. The current version of the Nonprofit Element Attribute Table looks like this: