A Six-Part Series Sharing What Every Nonprofit Leader Needs to Know to Win in a Data-Driven Funding World
I’ve been a technologist most of my career — happily behind the scenes for the last decade.
In 2024, the Urban League of Broward County, Florida, brought iBridge a problem: the nonprofit sector needed a case management system built for the way organizations actually work. That conversation grew to include Microsoft and Darrell Booker, whose convict
ion turned exploration into something real.
I’ll spare you the build story.What I won’t spare you is what we found.
Most good ideas are tripped over, not conjured. I built EthicsPoint — now Navex Global — in the early 2000s to give people a voice inside institutions that weren’t designed to hear them. The nonprofit sector has the same problem. In most health and human services nonprofits, communication runs through the case manager — one direction, on the organization’s schedule, in the organization’s language.
The case file is generally accurate. It captures what the system was designed to capture. But it tells you almost nothing about what is actually happening in a client’s life between appointments. That gap is not a technology failure. It is a design assumption we inherited and didn’t question. We recognized it and rebuilt — more dynamic conversations, smarter data. But fixing the tool doesn’t fix the model.
The problem is structural. I’m writing for executives whose current methods aren’t delivering the intelligence a complex world demands or the answers their funding partners increasingly require.
Paper One — The File Is Not the Person — is the opening argument. It asks why we built case management around the record instead of the person, and what it costs us when we do. Read it. Then tell me I’m wrong.
David Childers Chief Operating Officer
Contact Me If you are a practitioner in the non-profit space or a funder, I would appreciate your feedback on these whitepapers.