Technical Advisor, Friends of The Pittsburgh Fisher House
Overview
During my time at Pitt, I was introduced to the Friends of the Pittsburgh Fisher House, a non-profit who supports the VA Pittsburgh Fisher House. The Fisher House is a foundation that houses veteran's families while the veteran is receiving medical care at a nearby VA hospital. Pittsburgh's first Fisher House is located on the campus of the VA Hospital in Oakland, and a capital campaign is under way to build a new Fisher House in O'Hara Township.
My role with the Friends of the Pittsburgh Fisher House originally started out as a consulting role, helping them combine two custom built HTML websites into one CMS built site using Weebly. This included not only the CMS build, but also managing their DNS namespace and email servers. After this project, the Board of Directors of the Friends asked me to stay on as a technical advisor. I've served in this role since 2015. In our last major project, I helped them migrate to a new donation management system and continue to help them manage their website, integrations, email services, and DNS name space (which you can read more of below).
Most recently, I was the primary IR coordinator whenever our donation form was being spammed for card testing. Working with our vendors and our board members, I was able to stop the current attack, implement better safe guards (that the vendor should have implemented, but did not), and then restored full functionality to the donation systems. (Important Note: this was not a breach, and at no time was donor information at risk of being compromised).
Past Major Project
Image courtesy of Microsoft.
Email and Domain Migration
For a more robust email experience, we migrated away from the legacy iPage email and domain management to a more sophisticated Microsoft 365 email and Google Domains.
This was a multi-phase project that involved transfering domain registrars, setting up a non-profit Microsoft 365 account, and migrating the emails from iPage to Microsoft 365. A redacted version of the project proposal can be found below.
This project was successfully completed March 4, 2023.
Email and Domain Migration - Redacted.pdfOther Contributions
Facilitated the combination of donation management system and CRM into Bloomerang
Integrated Bloomerang contact and donation forms into the Weebly website
Assisted in cleaning up old email accounts and domain names
Assisted in on-boarding new part-time assistant for the board of the Friends
Design and maintain their website using website creation tools
Provide recommendations on new technologies to solve technical challenges
Facilitated the deployment of a new donation management system with Donorbox
Migrated two old websites into one new site