Our History

NPOKI Consulting LLC is a consulting group that has evolved from the NonProfit Organizations Knowledge Initiative (NPOKI). It is important to understand the history of the development of the consulting group by taking a look at its roots.

The original NPOKI was established as a collaboration among key international nonprofit health organizations. The relationship began with collaborations between information officers at International Planned Parenthood Federation and EngenderHealth in 2004, who realized that each had invested enormous sums of donor money in the development of similar enterprise-wide management information systems. In sharing a demonstration of their systems, their realization was both profound and frightening. The two applications were similar in approach, methodology, development protocol, and scope of work. The problems faced by both organizations as they developed the applications were similar. Future development needs were similar. In short, both organizations in parallel had spent millions of dollars developing what was basically the same application!

In January 2005, NPOKI was founded to identify affordable tools that would:

provide affordable information management and support systems for tracking the performance of large numbers of projects in a variety of countries against strategic goals,
align financial investment with results, and
allow NGOs to collect, analyze and share information across program, departmental, institutional and geographical boundaries.

Under a grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, NPOKI was designed to act as “…a trusted catalyst for international health organizations; advancing their life-saving missions through collaboration, the application of proven practices, and the technical assistance needed to achieve those results.”

Over the next decade, the original group of 11 international health organizations grew to a network of more than 40 members and partners. NPOKI’s programmatic work included webinars, conferences, digital communities, organizational assessments, and software development.

In 2016, NPOKI stakeholders began an internal discussion as to whether their mission had been met. With more than a decade of experience assessing NGO information needs - prototyping impact management systems like MERIT, and driving the conversation toward shared development performance metrics like the WHO’s HDMX-SD - NPOKI began to work with the University of Olso to develop and promote DHIS2, an open source software platform that enables governments and organizations to collect, manage, and analyze data. Within this context, NPOKI resolved that it had achieved its mission.

In 2018, NPOKI, upon resolution of its Board of Directors, merged with Humentum (formerly InsideNGO). At the same time, the consulting principals of NPOKI registered as an LLC in order to continue specific work in areas of information management.

NPOKI Consulting LLC works on an international scale. We have been virtual from inception. We work primarily with nonprofit organizations, with activities based in the US and in-country. Joining us in that work are a number of senior, independent consultants whose specialized skills integrate seamlessly with information management; e.g. financial management, human resources and strategic development among other special interests.