Civic · grants & donor intelligence
NexusCivic
A single system for the unglamorous side of civic and nonprofit work: finding funding, tracking it as it moves from prospect to awarded, managing donors, and keeping stakeholder research where the rest of the pipeline can use it.
01 / Origin
The challenge
Give a lean civic or nonprofit team one place to answer "who could fund this, where does each opportunity stand, and who do we already know?" — instead of that intelligence living in a dozen spreadsheets and inboxes. Built to be a reusable template for any Illinois city or campaign, not a one-off.
02 / Artifacts
What exists because of it
- 01
A CRM configured for funding work, where grants and donors are modelled as opportunities with a status that moves — prospect through awarded — rather than static organization records.
- 02
Stakeholder intelligence: open-source research on the people and organizations that matter, flowing into the CRM instead of a research doc nobody reopens.
- 03
A nightly pipeline that rebuilds a canonical intelligence dataset so the picture stays current on its own.
- 04
Dashboards over the funding pipeline for an at-a-glance read on what is moving.
03 / System
How it moves
An open-source CRM sits at the center, with custom objects so a funder can be a prospect this quarter and awarded the next and the record reflects it. Research and enrichment run through automated workflows and land in the CRM as structured records. A scheduled pipeline assembles the canonical dataset each night, and a dashboards layer reads it for reporting. The deliberate design choice is modelling funders as moving opportunities, not companies — because the thing being tracked is a pipeline stage, and an organization record cannot carry that.
- Input Research OSINT on people & orgs
- Step CRM funders as moving opportunities
- Step Pipeline prospect → awarded
- Output Dashboards the funding picture
04 / Decisions
The tools and their jobs
- Twenty open-source CRM (custom objects)
- OSINT tooling stakeholder research
- n8n enrichment & pipeline workflows
- Scheduled pipeline nightly canonical dataset
- Metabase funding-pipeline dashboards
05 / Today
An honest current state.
The intelligence-and-funding core works as a demo and, more importantly, as a template that would generalize to another city or campaign. It was deliberately narrowed to intelligence and funding — outreach and email-drip pieces were scoped out on purpose so the differentiating part stays sharp. This has been built as a spec/demo rather than for a paying client, so it is sized to be convincing and finished, not hardened for production.