EZNP is intended as a service to the non-profit community. It is available online at a modest cost to cover expenses.

1. Designed and Programmed by a Real Non-profit Administrator

EZNP has been built by a non-profit administrator with over 30 years of experience founding and successfully building non-profit organizations; and over 20 years designing and programming computer systems. The result is a system that is very attuned to the real life needs of administering a non-profit and all the details that make life complicated.

By comparison, most systems -- non-profit management or anything else -- are implemented by designers and programmers who have ASKED potential users what they need and how they do their work. Some of those people are really good at asking, and some are not. And some administrators are good at explaining, some not. But programmers cannot appreciate the many, many exceptions to any administrative method you can think of, because they haven't dealt with it. Non-profits are full of exceptions because they serve people, and people come in lots of varieties with lots of different agendas.

EZNP has been created by someone who has lived through it all. Living it is much more helpful than asking about it.

2. Integrated and Inclusive

A very important goal of EZNP is to get all the work together in the same system, so you are not constantly transferring data back and forth; cutting and merging lists; using different systems with different ways of doing things; losing track of whether certain work was completed.

Most non-profits use many different software programs and outside services to get their work done. This both complicates the work and makes it difficult to get your information together in one place.

• If you are using an outside accounting system, that system knows nothing about your customers.
• If you are selling tickets with an online service, or getting paid with PayPal, those transactions are with the online service, not in your books. You have to transfer the information over, creating errors and omissions in the process.
• If someone registers for a program, you may not have easily accessible records about what they registered for in the past.
• If you want to send a mailing to donors who have previously bought tickets, that information may be hard to retrieve.


3. Easy to Use

With everything in one system, you only have to click on a menu to get to whatever you want to work on (instead of trying to remember who you used last time). Most of what you need to do can be done with clicks on the proper choices, leaving you to type only text information such as names, addresses, amounts, etc. Quick queries and even complex reports are created just with clicks, so you don't really have to learn much.

There is full documentation with examples, pictures, and clear, complete instructions about how to do things. It's all right there in the system -- you don't have to look it up somewhere else.

And since it is one integrated system, everything is done the same way. Once you get the hang of it, there is hardly anything new to learn.

4. Customizable by You

What works for one organization may not be right for another. But you can do things your way. Here are a few examples. You can

• call the people you serve clients, students, campers, customers, or whatever you wish.
• create all the email lists you want.
• If someone registers for a program, you may not have easily accessible records about what they registered for in the past.
• decide what activities you need to keep track of and call them whatever suits you. If a concert is an activity, you can call it a concert, the concert of 2/10/22, special concert, benefit concert, or whatever works for you.
• distinguish between large and small donors if you wish. Or keep the names of peoples' kids and pets or their birthdays, even if no one else does.
• call a marketing expense 'marketing' or 'markt' or 'omarket'.
• automatically number your orders or receipts as you like.


5. Actively Prevents Errors

EZNP has been carefully constructed to make it easy for you to use, and hard for you to make mistakes. That doesn't mean you can't do something wrong like misspelling a name or typing in a wrong number. But there is a lot of care to prevent you from getting things really tangled up.

• If you did type someone's name in wrong, you won't have a chance to type it another way somewhere else. Once it is in EZNP, it is there. You can fix it in one spot. But you won't have a chance to spell someone's name 3 different ways.
• Everyone on your list has a unique identification code assigned by EZNP, so that you can't get people mixed up.
• All the data entry and all the reporting is done the same way, so you won't get confused by doing things differently in different places.
• The system is full of clear, concise error messages that a human person can understand, and has many tooltips for guidance.
• EZNP will not let you delete anything that is in use elsewhere. For example, you can't delete John Jones from your lists if he bought a ticket and that's in your financial records.
• But to get old stuff out of your way, you can archive it. If you need it later, you can get it back with just a click.
• Many things you have entered freeform in the past are controlled by lists which you create. If people on your lists are customers, ticket-holders, donors, prospects, staff, and faculty you will create a list with those items. Then when you tag a person as a donor, you can only use the spelling on your control list. By using list control all sorts of errors are avoided, and it becomes easy to do analyses like 'How many people who bought tickets for Concert A also bought tickets for Concert B?'
• Reporting is done by clicks, but there are all sorts of safeguards to prevent you from doing unsuitable things. (Did you really want to sort people by email address? EZNP thinks not.)
6. System Requirements

EZ*NP is intended for small non-profits which do not have time or resources to hire extra administrators or pay for expensive software. This page is to alert you to some executive decisions that were made to keep the amount of coding manageable, and the cost of development and maintenance down.

• Devices

EZ*NP is coded to be run on a full size screen, and is not meant to be an app. Much of the ease of use comes from arranging things in clear menus, which small screens are not friendly to. Most of the data entry involves a lot of information, also not suitable for a small screen. Finally, EZ*NP is meant to run your organization. This should not be done by making decisions on the fly while you are in a line or conversing with your friends. We urge you to use a full-sized screen (and to think through your choices carefully).

• Firefox Browser

To access the internet you use a browser. There are multitudes of browsers out there, and each differs a bit from the others. Commercial websites like those you see on Amazon, are built to accommodate as many browsers as possible, which means extra coding to account for all the differences. We made an executive decision to optimize EZ*NP for the Firefox browser, in order to save the extra coding (and avoid cluttering up the code with all those exceptions).

Firefox is available free for almost every computer and operating system. We recommend that you download it and use it access EZ*NP. Except for Internet Explorer, most other browsers will work pretty well, as their differences are small. However, Internet Explorer is an outlier, with substantial differences. EZ*NP will not work in this browser.

• Javascript

Hopefully this will not concern you, but you do need to have Javascript enabled in order to run EZ*NP. Most browsers enable it automatically, but if you have systems people it is possible they turned it off -- you can ask, and tell them to turn it back on.