Frappe Changemakers is basically a Beneficiary Management System. It helps non-profit and social organisations to manage their beneficiaries and track services provided to them. Although, it was developed for a specific use case of managing a Homeless Care Programme, it can be easily customised to fit any generic use case in which services are being provided to someone in need. It is made with the field workers in mind.
Frappe Changemakers is a custom Frappe app built on Frappe Framework. The PWA is built using Frappe UI, VueJS and Ionic. We plan to convert the PWA to a native mobile app using CapacitorJS soon.
You can get a local installation running by following the below steps:
- Setup Frappe bench, instructions can be found here.
- Create a new site
- Install the Changemakers app using the bench
get-appandinstall-appcommand:
bench get-app changemakers # Add to bench
bench --site mysite.localhost install-app changemakers # Install on the site you wantIn this section, I have described some central pieces of the Changemakers platform.
The Beneficiary DocType is central to every other DocType in the system. It contains all the information regarding the Beneficiary, the person to whom the services will be provided. In the Homeless Care Program, the beneficiary refers to the Homeless person, but it can easily be customized to store the information relevant to your particular use case.
Cases (or Tickets) power the core workflow of identification and fulfillment of the need. A case can be assigned a type (like Food, Shelter etc.), priority and more. Using the built-in assignments feature in Frappe Framework, multiple people can be assigned to a particular case.
Since the social workers should be able to easily see a summary of the tickets assigned to or created by them, we have a very useful report:
Rescue DocType can be used to track in-field rescue operations. The Geo-location field can be used to set the exact rescue location by the Field workers.
This category of DocTypes is used to track services provided to the Beneficiaries. Below are some of the service related DocTypes with a summary:
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Food Distribution Record: Used to track Food Distributions.
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Entitlement Request: Used to track entitlements (Identity Card, etc.) to be serviced.
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Shelter Home Admission/Exit: Used to track Shelter Home services.
...and more.
Used to store additional fields related to a user. Currently, stores the Designation and Organisation of the user. The profile can be created/viewed from the User form view:
There are other DocType's that are used to track master data of entities that are related to providing services:
- Organisation: To track different organisations or partners.
- Shelter Home: Master data for shelter home.
- Healthcare Provider: Master data for hospitals and other healthcare providers.
- Learning Center: Master data for different types of learning centers.
Since, Changemakers is built on Frappe Framework, a lot of flexibility and customisation options are at your disposal. You can customise the DocTypes (add/remove fields, validations etc.) to a great extent. You can add client/server scripts to control the behavior even more. Apart from using the existing roles (like Shelter Team Member, Food Team Member, etc.), you can easily create a configure more roles and permissions.
The Customisation Form and the Role Permission Manager are very powerful tools that you can use to mold this application to your use case. You can use the Awesome Bar (search bar in the Frappe admin interface) to look for these pages.
This project has been developed in collaboration with Azim Premji Foundation. Frappe Changemakers is being currently used in production by two of the partner organisations of APF to run the Homeless Care programme in Bangalore (Smile Care) and Chennai (Madras School of Social Work). They plan to roll-out the programme pan-India in the near future.
The mobile frontend is still a work in progress, you can get the android app running by installing the dependencies, ionic CLI and doing:
ionic cap run androidYou can access the user manual for this app here. Special thanks to Umair Sayyed for writing this manual.
Some of the ways in which you can contribute to this project:
- ⭐ By giving it a star on GitHub, it encourages us to do more!
- 🐛 By Reporting any bugs/issues encountered during usage.
- 🙈 By Fixing Typos, Booboos etc. and raising a Pull Request.
- 🚀 By sharing it with the world!
If you think this app can be made more generic to fit more (or your) use cases, I would be more than happy to have a chat with you. You can create a new issue titled Use Case and tag me!
Special thanks to Jagadisha Behura and Nikhil George from the IT team at APF to help with the requirement collection and testing phases. Also, a big thanks to the whole APF team for sponsoring this FOSS project!
Thanks to Rushabh and Umair from Frappe for collaborating with me on this project.
