Reports: Impact Tracking as Easy as Sending a Text

When we set out to build our first product, we asked ourselves a fairly narrow question: what's the simplest possible way for someone doing the actual work of a nonprofit to record that the work happened? Not the most powerful way, or the most feature-rich way — the simplest. Everything about Reports follows from that question.

Two ideas: Programs and Activities

Reports is organized around two concepts, and only two. A Program is the ongoing work your organization does — a tutoring initiative, a food pantry, a job-training track. An Activity is a specific instance of that work happening — Tuesday's tutoring session, this week's pantry distribution, Thursday's résumé workshop.

That's the whole mental model. There's no taxonomy to learn, no custom fields to configure before you can get started, no onboarding call required to understand what goes where. Most people can create their organization and file their first Activity Report within about fifteen minutes of signing up — often faster, because there's genuinely very little to figure out.

Report anywhere, including from a flip phone

The core interaction in Reports is filing an Activity Report, and you can do it however fits the moment: through the website, on mobile, or — the part that tends to surprise people — by text message. After a session wraps up, a volunteer or program lead can text in what happened the same way they'd text a friend to say how their afternoon went. No app to install, no login to remember, no dashboard to navigate mid-shift.

This matters more than it might sound like at first. The organizations that most need better impact data are usually the ones with the least capacity to sit down at a computer and enter it. A tutor leaving a session, a pantry volunteer breaking down tables, a case worker between appointments — none of them have twenty minutes to log into a platform. They might have thirty seconds to send a text. Reports is built around that thirty seconds, because that's the amount of friction that actually determines whether reporting happens at all.

Share everywhere, without extra work

Every Activity Report that comes in gets organized automatically — tagged, sorted, and rolled up into the kind of clear, chartable data that used to take hours of spreadsheet work to assemble. Staff can filter and review what's coming in, and the same data that powers day-to-day oversight can generate public-facing Impact Reports for supporters, board reports, and the material for an annual report — all pulled from information that was already captured in real time, rather than reconstructed from memory during a stressful grant deadline.

That's the transformative part, and it's easy to undersell: an organization that reports as it goes ends up with a running, always-current record of its impact, instead of a scramble every time someone asks for one. When a funder wants evidence, or a board member wants a quick update, or a new donor wants to see what their gift would actually support, the answer is already sitting there, organized and ready to share — because it was building itself in the background the whole time.

Why free, and why we mean it

Reports is free for most nonprofits, and that's a deliberate choice, not an introductory offer. There are no ads on the platform, no tip jars nudging your donors, no freemium ceiling where the tool suddenly starts charging once your organization grows past some limit, and no plan to make money by selling anyone's data. We cover the infrastructure costs ourselves for now, with a longer-term plan to let organizations contribute what they're able to once we're fully recognized as a 501(c)(3).

We built it this way because we think the organizations that would benefit most from good impact data — small, community-rooted nonprofits without a grants team or a data department — are exactly the ones who get priced out of the tools built for larger organizations. If tracking your impact could genuinely change how much funding you're able to bring in, cost shouldn't be the reason you go without it.

Reports is the first thing we've built, but it's built on a belief we'll carry into everything that follows: the tools that help nonprofits run their work well shouldn't be a luxury reserved for the organizations that can already afford consultants and dashboards. They should be free, and they should be easy enough to use that using them is just part of how the work already gets done.

If you're running a small nonprofit and want to see what a running, always-current record of your impact could look like, Reports takes about fifteen minutes to set up — and your first report can be as simple as a text.