The Linseed project was begin in 2019 by Jen James and Nathan Lyczak - long time collaborators working together in Boston at the Food Project and Farm Aid since since 1997. Recognizing the need for a non-profit management platform that met the needs for managing youth development programs in the greater Boston area while also supporting fundraising and farming. By 2020, Andrea Alderman brought Linseed to the Center at Orchard Hill in Alstead NH, inaugurating the vision that many organizations could contribute to the costs of a custom web-based software platform and collaborate in designing new features and sharing their best-practices.

Linseed provides a powerful user-friendly holistic general-purpose database for your community and the programs you offer - in such a way that you won't need to turn to other software for your daily tasks. Features & modules include: People • Households • Organizations • Family Relationships • Programs • Events • Memberships • Registration • Attendance • Images • Payments • Donations • Invoicing • Online Product Sales • Bank Deposits & Reconciliation • Credit Card Transactions • Notes & Tags • Email Templates • Surveys • Website integration • Brevo Integration • Online Forms • Farming Harvest & Distribution • Hiring, Contracting, Timesheets & Payroll • Shared Staff Calendar & Resource Scheduling

LINSEED BUILDS LIFETIME MULTI-GENERATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS with PEOPLE and FAMILIES: Linseed is designed to manage many ways that a person might be part of your community: from an interested newsletter recipient, a program applicant, a program participant, an alumni, an aspiring staff member, a contracted employee, a donor, a board member, or a parent of a future student.

LINSEED UNDERSTANDS COMPLEX FAMILIES, IDENTITIES, and RELATIONSHIPS: Linseed easily accommodates the details of changing gender identities and complex relationships between families, households, children, and adults. We model and communicate clearly between parents, step-parents, social workers, custodians, foster-parents, and children with multiple households.

LINSEED OFFERS A LOW-FRICTION HASSLE-FREE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: We use simple secure links delivered via email to protect the privacy and integrity of everyone's data. Your community members will enjoy accessing web forms and registration portals without the hassle of being forced to create user accounts, passwords and authentication codes.

LINSEED BUILDS SOCIAL CONNECTIONS: Linseed helps staff to know the people in your community rather than simply providing aggregated lists of data. All incoming information from web forms is quickly and gracefully reviewed by humans before being added to the database, and the use of photographs add recognition and personal connection.

LINSEED MAKES PERSONALIZED COMMUNICATION EASY: Templated transactional emails (“thank you for your application”, “please complete these missing forms on your portal”, “here’s how to arrive for your program”) are quick and easy to personalize and send. SMS text messages are sent and received for short quick communications. Brevo integration makes it easy to send beautiful newsletters and appeals to thousands of people at once.

LINSEED AUTOMATICALLY KEEPS YOUR WEBSITE UP TO DATE: Create an upcoming future program or event in Linseed, and it will instantly appear on your website, complete with marketing photographs, dates, times, pricing, and registration options.

LINSEED PROVIDES ACCESS FROM A MOBILE DEVICE: Access Linseed from your mobile device to see upcoming calendar events, contact information, or emergency information for incident response.

LINSEED PROVIDES FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT & FUNDRAISING: Linseed works hand-in-hand with accounting software like Quickbooks to manage tuition charges, product sales, invoicing, statements, and payments. Linseed integrates fully with STRIPE for seamless processing of credit card payments and donations. Receive and process donations directly into Linseed through your website. Manage complex fundraising appeals, annual grant-writing cycles, and sophisticated long-term fundraising campaigns engaging staff and board members in the soliciting and collection of pledges and major gifts.

DIETARY, MEDICAL & BEHAVIORAL NEEDS: Smoothly capture initial assessments of prospective students' special needs. Manage medications in the field with up--to-date prescription forms.

LINSEED HAS YOUR BACK: A complete backup of data in Excel spreadsheet format is delivered weekly to your administrator via email.

Ben Murray quality control, new feature design	Nathan Lyczak coding, training & technical support
A FEW OF THE ORGANZATIONS THAT ARE PART OF THE LINSEED COLLABORATION:
Martha's Vineyard Ocean Academy is an educational nonprofit that has owned and operated the tall ship Shenandoah since 2020, its mission is to help youth develop lifelong purpose, happiness, and resilience through guided voyages of self-discovery. The Farm School has been helping people connect to the land since 1989, situated on nearly 400 acres and offering three and five-day programs for visiting school groups, a full-time middle school for local children, Nipmuc Land Project, and Food Donation. Kroka Expeditions A non-profit wilderness expedition school based on a year-round organic farm in Marlow, New Hampshire, serving more than 1,000 students each year with a curriculum of adventure sports, sustainable living, and community development. The Nature Institute is a small independent nonprofit in Ghent, NY, founded in 1998, that does research, publishing, and education programs developing qualitative, holistic ways of understanding nature and technology. Red Gate Farm in Ashfield, MA is a non-profit educational farm providing overnight farm experiences for children and school groups, with a mission to grow children who are hard-working, confident, and kind. Rite of Passage Journeys, established in 1968 in Bothell, WA, mentors youth, adults, and elders through life transitions using wilderness rite-of-passage experiences, to help raise thoughtful leaders for the next generation. Orchard Hill Breadworks, a community-centered village bakery in Alstead, New Hampshire, specializing in wood-fired sourdough breads, that also runs as a teaching bakery with an apprenticeship program in artisan bread and pastry. Laughing Coyote Project a nonprofit school founded in 2007 by Gelsey Malferrari and Neal Ritter that teaches primitive and ancestral skills to people of all ages through homeschool programs, teen expeditions, and workshops on their homestead farm in Longmont, CO. Journeymen is a Vashon Island–based Washington nonprofit, founded by Nicky Wilks and Alex Craighead, that cultivates transformational experiences for boys and men through nature-based rites of passage, mentorship, training, and community events. Insight Photography in Brattleboro, VT was founded in 1992 and teaches darkroom, digital, and video photography to youth ages 11–18 regardless of their ability to pay, using the photographic arts to build belonging, community, and empowerment.

	Linseed is fully integrated with Brevo: An AI-powered customer platform for all your marketing and sales needs. Eail marketing, SMS, WhatsApp, and beyond: drive business growth and lasting loyalty. Brevo’s mission is to build the most approachable customer platform to deliver sustainable growth to all businesses and non-profit organizations by fostering more human and personalized connections.
	For image hosting, Linseed uses Cloudinary, a cloud-based media management platform founded in 2012, that helps developers and businesses upload, transform, optimize, and deliver images and video at scale. Its API-driven approach lets teams apply on-the-fly transformations, AI-powered optimization, and adaptive delivery so visual content automatically renders fast and looks great across any device, browser, or bandwidth.
	Linseed is hosted by Heroku Salesforce, a cloud application platform used by organizations of all sizes to deploy and operate applications throughout the world. Our platform allows organizations to focus on application development and business strategy while Heroku focuses on infrastructure management, scaling, and security. click here to learn more...
	Linseed relies on Postmark. a cloud-based transactional email service built for developers, specializing in the delivery of app-triggered messages like password resets, order confirmations, and welcome emails rather than bulk marketing newsletters.
	We process credit card transactions using Stripe, a global financial infrastructure platform that lets businesses of every size accept payments, manage subscription billing, and move money across 135+ currencies and payment methods via developer-friendly APIs.
	For text message communication with your community, Linseed uses Twilio, a cloud communications platform that lets developers embed voice, SMS, video, chat, and authentication capabilities directly into their applications via simple, robust APIs.

The costs of developing and operating Linseed are shared by multiple non-profit organizations on a sliding-scale basis based on each organization's annual operating budget. Pricing commitments are revisited on an annual basis to ensure that they are affordable and equitable.

INITIAL DATA CONVERSION:		If your data is scattered across mutiple spreadsheets and applications) it may take some significant effort to consolidate it into Linseed during your initial installation. We offer 4 hours of free technical support for consulting and data conversion, after which we will bill you for any additional time needed.
ADDITIONAL TRAINING & TECH SUPPORT:		Onboarding many new staff? Expanding into new program initiatives? Launching a new fundraising campaign? It will be worth your while to get training and tech support in how to best use Linseed.
CUSTOM FEATURE DEVELOPMENT:		We will attempt to accommodate you if you have special needs that are unique to your organization, however you will find that most of what you are looking for already exists within the current platform!
COST:		Our current rate for additional data coversion, tech support, and custom feature development is $65.00 per hour.
CREDIT CARD FEES:	via STRIPE	If you wish to process revenue and donations from credit cards directly within Linseed via the Stripe Platform, you will pay transaction fees to Stripe. Credit card fees typically average around (3.50%) (+ 30 cents) per transaction.

• Click here to see a few of our learning guides.
• Click here to learn about Linseed's financial management tools.

Linseed membership is currently by invitation only. If someone has recommended Linseed to you, please ask them for a reference.