Category: Nonprofit

On November 27, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent conference returns to Las Vegas, Nevada for our twelfth year of learning with cloud enthusiasts from around the world. To make the most of your experience, we’ve put together this guide to some of the public sector sessions and activities at re:Invent. 

The first blog post in this series outlined considerations for developing API pipelines on AWS to extract data from third-party SaaS tools. With consolidated data, public sector organizations can offer new experiences for donors and members, enrich research datasets, and improve operational efficiency for their staff. This follow-up blog post presents options for ingesting SaaS data with API requests from AWS services, methods for handling payload data from API calls, and guidance for orchestration and scaling an API data pipeline on AWS.

At this year’s re:Invent conference, AWS is introducing Innovation Talks, which are deep dives hosted by AWS thought leaders. Dave Levy, vice president of AWS worldwide public sector, is hosting the session, “Empowering citizens through digital innovation” and will be joined by speakers from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Covered California, and Singapore’s Smart Nation and Digital Government Group (SNDGG). Read this blog post to learn more about these featured customers.

Without proper documentation, unhoused individuals face overwhelming barriers to stability and opportunity. But new technologies and tools address these problems while helping the organizations who serve vulnerable populations. One innovative solution called Kiip, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), takes a unique approach to this problem by empowering individuals with access and control over their own personal, vital documents.

Organizations deal with ever-growing data volumes. This means that growth-minded businesses must put data at the heart of every application, process, and decision. But how you use your organization’s data is the key to accelerating innovation and accomplishing your organizational goals.

Public sector organizations often utilize third-party Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to manage various business functions, such as marketing and communications, payment processing, workflow automation, donor management, and more. This common SaaS landscape can lead to data silos where data becomes isolated in disparate systems and difficult to centralize for business insights. If existing SaaS connectors are not available, public sector organizations can use AWS to build an API-driven data pipeline to consolidate data from SaaS platforms offering open APIs. In this post, learn how to build an API data pipeline on AWS.

Since wildfires can double in size and intensity every three to five minutes, early detection and reduced response times are essential. Cloud technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), can help with this. Learn a high-level architecture to create a solution with AWS that uses AI to identify and classify wildfire smoke imagery and then rapidly alert and inform first responders about the location and condition of a fire incident.

The AWS for Nonprofits team announced a new Amazon AppFlow data connector that enables nonprofits to transfer valuable data from Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT to AWS services and other destinations. In this blog post, learn some common nonprofit use cases that can be addressed by integrating your data with other AWS services and commercially available software-as-service (SaaS) applications.

Community Solutions is a US-based nonprofit working to end homelessness through its Built for Zero program, a movement uniting with cities across the US to bridge strategy and support to reduce homelessness. The AWS Fix This podcast sat down with the Community Solutions team to see how it uses AWS to unlock data to measure and monitor its progress. Plus, representatives from the nonprofit Coming Home of Middlesex County, based in New Jersey, joined to discuss how Middlesex County and Community Solutions are working together to create a future where no one is left behind.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies are transforming many industries. But although public sector organizations are realizing the benefits of these technologies, there are many remaining challenges, including biases and a lack of transparency, that limit the wider adoption to unlock the full potential of AI and ML. In this post, learn a high-level framework for how AWS can help you address these challenges and provide better outcomes for constituents.