Social network with unique database capabilities

Question

We're a non-profit organization that coordinates the donation of school supplies from wealthy schools to under-funded schools.

My goal is to build an online application that empowers all of the schools (and the students and teachers) to communicate with other in order to facilitate the donations. Here’s what we need the platform to do:

• Each school club needs to be able to create and maintain an online profile.

• Each volunteer student and teacher needs to be able to create and maintain their own online profile, as well as being able to 'join' their school club’s online profile/group.

• The wealthy school club needs to be able to enter the items they have available for donation, probably selecting from a list of many possible items (this will probably done through a series of online forms).

• The under-funded school club needs to be able to indicate what they need, also in an online form.

• All schools should be able to see these lists online in order to figure out where the surplus items should go.

• We need to keep track of all past deliveries in order to measure the financial impact, and display that information on each of the school club's online profiles.

• All students need the ability to post somehow in the system, like blog posts or status updates.

I'm trying to figure out how I should go about building this. The existing website is in WordPress, so I may want to build this solution in WordPress, or it may be better to build a separate system using other software, or there's a chance I could even create a Facebook app.

Any ideas?

I've made a video to try to explain all of this better: http://philstorage.s3.amazonaws.com/shs-needs.mp4

Answer 1

You could try out "kintone".

It has features to create multiple databases (which they call "Apps") via GUI, and you don't have to be an IT expert to create/edit these.
It also has a feature called "Spaces", which is like a forum for teams to share information. You can have club A creating and using their own "Space", and club B creating and using their own "Space" so the conversation is kept separate.

Only people with user accounts to your kintone environment can view/add data in your Apps and Spaces (although, there are extra services which can make your app data public, or create forms so that non-users can enter data inside - comes with an additional cost).

Last but not least, they have a nonprofit program. I'm sure they can walk you through a nice demo :) https://www.kintone.com/nonprofit/

Good luck, keep it up, and I hope you find a good IT solution to fit your needs for this excellent work!