How can NPEngine help my Nonprofit?

NPEngine is an "all in one" solution that makes it cheap and easy to create a dynamic web platform for your nonprofit organization. Aside from signifiant up front savings, your nonprofit website is community driven and requires no webmasters or other technically inclined (and expensive) staff members. Using NPEngine should help make your nonprofit more efficient while keeping your focus on your charitable mission.

How much can we save with NPEngine?

For starters, our one-time setup costs are well below those of our competitors. For example, Convio charges over $10000 just to get started, while the less robust NonProfitSoapBox starts at $2000 for small nonprofits. Our setup prices are the same regardless of your nonprofit's size, supporter base and usage. So your nonprofit could save up to a few thousand right off the bat.

Further, we are unique in not charging ANY post-launch fees except for optional, usage based support. A $200 monthly fee might seem reasonable for a smaller nonprofit, but that adds up to $2400 per year.. $2400 which could be better spent in pursuit of the nonprofit's mission.

The savings just start there, however. The NPEngine platform is designed to be maintained and updated by ordinary folks, not expensive technical personnel. Donors, Volunteers, Staff and Officials can add content to their site through familiar actions like sending an email, creating/uploading a Google Doc or posting a Facebook Update. No webmaster or other technically inclined staff required!

How is NPE so much cheaper than everyone else?

We're a lean, mean, bootstrapped startup. Our operation consists entirely of engineers, with no overhead for sales and administrative staff and no outlays for extraneous expenses. All of our engineers were especially picked for being good communicators and moonlight as sales and support staff.

In addition, we have an extreme aversion to spending money online, and we pass this on to our clients. When something can be done for free, like hosting videos on YouTube or images on Picasa, we take that option rather than try and profit by charging a premium for hosted storage.

Where is my site hosted, and is my data secure?

Each NPE website runs on it's own Google App Engine instance. Google App Engine (GAE) is a cloud-based, infinitely scalable and extremely reliable platform for dynamic web applications. As GAE provides free hosting up to 5 million page views/month, 99.9% of nonprofit websites would run without paying a dime for hosting.

Internet security is a big deal, and there is no nonprofit specific service with the resources to combat the ever expanding arsenal of malicious hackers. NPE works around this problem by offloading it to larger corporations (such as Google) with expert teams dedicated to fighting the data security war.

While the "action" takes place on GAE, your content and data is distributed across several free and highly secure services, such as Picasa Web Albums (for images), Google Docs and Spreadsheets, YouTube (for videos) and more. Aside from increasing security, this saves your nonprofit a bunch of cash and makes it easy to update your site using the services you already know and love

How much control do I have over how my site looks?

You have complete control over your NPE website's design. You can either choose one of our expanding collection of pre-configured templates, transfer an existing design, have us work with your own designer or have us create a new design from scratch.

What if we don't have any tech people?

NPEngine Web Applications are built to run without any technical knowledge. Instead of requiring a "webmaster" to maintain your site, content is added through the ordinary actions of your nonprofit's supporters, volunteers, staff and officials. For example, project reports can be posted via email, documents/presentations/forms can be added through Google Docs, images through Picasa, videos through your foundations YouTube channel and more.

Can I show YouTube videos & other embedded content?

Of course. In addition to posting to your site's main gallery, media can be linked to Projects, Chapters, User Profiles and virtually every other type of platform content. NPE makes it much more convenient and a lot cheaper to upload and host media for your nonprofit website.

How many pages can my site have?

We don't impose any arbitrary limit to your NPE website's page count. You can add an unlimited amount of custom static pages, or add pages with dynamic content such as a discussion forum, Google Wave collaboration environment, embedded flash games and more.

How much space do I get for my media content?

Media content is distributed to external services such as Picasa Web Albums (for images), YouTube (for videos), Google Docs (for presentations) and more. These services are either unlimited in space usage (YouTube) or very cheap to upgrade if necessary (Google Docs/Picasa). In total, this arrangement allows for nearly unlimited free media storage and far more than any of our competitors allow.

When your site is close to reaching it's storage limits, you will be prompted in your admin console. You have the option of either paying the upgrade fee for the relevant service or (for the more frugal outfits) offloading the content to your user's accounts on these services. For example, Picasa allows for over a Gigabyte of free image hosting PER ACCOUNT. So if your users upload to their own Picasa accounts rather than that of your organization, then your storage space is truly unlimited!

What language is NPE written in, and can I get the source code?

The NPEngine backend is written in App Engine Python, while the front-end is a combination of JQuery and our proprietary javascript code. Currently we offer a source code license for $500, but we plan on releasing an open source version in the not so distant future.

Does NPEngine have an API?

We are currently developing standards compliant APIs to empower developers to add functionality to our platform. In addition to platform based APIs, NPE offers thorough integration with Google Apps which means immediate data access via Google Apps Scripts. In addition, we are working towards making NPE an "Open Social" platform which means access to thousands of existing applications.