Programme work, field updates and donor reporting in one place

How nonprofit work is different

A nonprofit runs programmes, not projects for paying clients. A programme has a funder, a logframe or results framework, activities spread across districts or partner organisations, and a reporting calendar set by the donor. The people doing the work are often in the field with patchy connections, while the people writing reports are in the office.

The pain points are familiar to anyone who has worked in an NGO. Field updates arrive as photos and messages in personal chat groups. Activity plans live in a spreadsheet that one officer maintains. When the quarterly donor report is due, the programme manager spends days collecting evidence from inboxes and phones. Staff turnover, common on fixed-term grants, takes the history with it.

One space per programme or grant

In Emitii each programme gets a space, for example "Field Program, Karnali". The Internal type turns on Tasks, Schedule, Timesheet and Posts, which suits most programme work; choose Project instead if you want a Board for activity tracking. Switch on Docs & Files for reports and evidence.

A typical programme space holds:

• Tasks for the activity plan, one list per output or per quarter: "Train 40 community health volunteers", "Conduct baseline survey", "Submit Q2 financial report". Monitoring visits can be repeating to-dos.
• Board (optional) for activities that move through stages: "Planned", "Approved", "In the field", "Reporting", "Done", with labels for districts.
• Pulse for the field team's daily updates, replacing personal chat groups. Photos and files can be attached, and threads keep each topic separate.
• Docs & Files for the proposal, logframe, training materials, attendance sheets, photos and each report version.
• Schedule for field visits, trainings, partner meetings and donor reporting deadlines.
• Posts for programme-wide updates, such as a policy change or the quarterly summary.

Field teams on phones

Emitii installs on a phone as a web app with push notifications, so field staff can post updates and tick off to-dos from where they work. Notification controls such as "Just me" and quiet hours keep the volume manageable. For guidance on distributed field teams, read how to manage distributed teams.

Donor reporting

When the report is due, the evidence is already in one place. The programme manager can filter the space Activity feed by tasks or posts to see what happened in the period, and read the Pulse history for field context. If AI is enabled for the organisation and the space, Emit can draft the donor summary from the space's tasks, posts and docs and save it into Docs & Files as a Word or PDF file, after you approve it. You still review and edit it before it goes to the donor.

Partners, consultants and donors

Implementing partners, external evaluators and donor programme officers can join as guests. A guest sees only the spaces they are added to and only the items the team shares. In each space's Guest access tab you set how much of each section guests see, so a donor might see shared Posts and a reports folder, while a partner organisation can also edit its own to-do lists and talk with staff in Guest Pulse. See guest access.

Staff time for grant compliance

Many donors ask for staff time allocation per grant. The Timesheet records hours in quarter hours per programme space, with weekly submission and approval, and exports to CSV. Hours can be linked to specific to-dos or cards, which helps when a report needs time per activity. The timesheets feature explains approvals.

Handover when staff change

Because the programme's decisions, files and conversation live in the space rather than in personal inboxes, a new programme officer can read the history on their first day. Admins add them to the space, or to a Group that already has access, and they see the same record as everyone else.

Try the NGO programme demo

There is a live NGO programme workspace you can open without signing in, set up as a field programme with tasks, schedule and chat. Open the industry demos; your changes stay in your browser.