Grantmaking database
The Project
Prospera is a cluster of 38 women's funds that mobilize about $66 million dollars and provide around 1,800 grants to organizations in more than 150 countries. It is a huge operation, and knowing how this money flows and where is it invested was a top priority for them.
To learn how their funds gave out grants, they used to rely on an external private source as well as on asking for information through Excel formats. Imagine receiving each year a batch of spreadsheets per organization, gathering everything to try to identify mistakes, coincidences, patterns and make reports from that.
That was the puzzle they gave us to solve: create an online solid and friendly tool to gather qualitative and quantitative information on all members of the network.
The Solution
The project was divided into phases: the first one was all about discovery, analysis and architecture. We took those spreadsheets and tore them apart, asked a lot of questions and reordered everything in diagrams and wireframes. We also delivered a technical description and systems requirements document of the tool needed.
Based on these requirements we set out to develop a secure, easy to maintain, flexible, well documented tool using Laravel for the backend and Nova for the frontend.
Security and other technical aspects
Being an online tool, security was an important concern for Prospera. Within the proposed Laravel structure, there are several security layers that are being applied to the project, in addition to other basic safety practices to reduce the potential vulnerabilities.
We identified 5 general security layers, some of which are comprised, in turn, of other layers or elements: HTTPS / SSL; Authentication and authorization middleware, through CSRF tokens and Throttling; Validation; Policies; and SQL injection filtering.
Another technical aspect we really like is its possibility to connect the database with Power BI, Tableau or other data visualization tools for generating reports and manipulate information freely.
Services Provided
Strategy | User Experience (UX) & Information Architecture | Systems architecture | UI Design | Back-end and front-end development | Data entry of catalogs and interface texts | Interface translation (Spanish, English, French) | Manual production | Training session | Quality Assurance | Aftercare
