What they actually do
Youth for Change is a youth NGO in Bitola, North Macedonia, and one of the organisations whose systems we build and look after. They run Erasmus+ training courses and youth exchanges with partner organisations across Europe. Every one of those means the same cycle: a call for participants, a pile of applications, a selection somebody has to defend, then travel money to pay back against receipts.
The part nobody builds software for
The public side of a youth NGO is a website. The work is everything after someone applies: reading applications against the criteria, scoring them, picking people, confirming places, then collecting travel receipts and reimbursing them at the right rate. That normally lives in a form tool, a spreadsheet, and a folder of photographed receipts, with one person holding the thread.
What runs there
- Projects in the shape Erasmus+ actually uses. A project record has fields for host organisation, reference number, dates, travel days, number of places, age range and application deadline, because that is what a call for participants has to state. Fourteen projects are loaded.
- An application form per project, with conditional questions. A question only appears if an earlier answer calls for it, and each question carries a flag for whether it counts toward the score.
- Parental consent as a real field, with the guardian's name, their contact and the moment consent was given. A share of applicants are under eighteen, so this is not paperwork you can leave to a reply in an inbox.
- Scoring and selection per reviewer, so a decision leaves a trail instead of living in one person's head.
- Participants confirmed from accepted applications, with a private link generated per person.
- Travel receipts filed against a participant, with the amount in denars and the euro rate stored on that participant. That is how Erasmus+ reimbursement actually works when the grant arrives in euros and the bus ticket is bought in denars.
- Rate limiting on the public application form, so the page cannot be hammered.
Where it honestly is today
The system is live and their projects are loaded. A real mobility is being run through it right now, the one going out in October: participants confirmed, the euro rate recorded against each of them, travel receipts filed. The application and scoring half is built and waiting for the next open call, so there is no volume claim to make on this page yet. When there is one, the number will go here.
Why this matters if you are reading it
You are probably not a youth NGO. This is here because the shape keeps repeating: a small organisation where the real work sits between an application arriving and a person actually going, and where that stretch lives in forms, spreadsheets and somebody's memory. Recruitment has the same stretch with different words on it.
The short version: projects, per-project application forms with conditional questions, guardian consent captured properly, reviewer scoring, confirmed participants and travel reimbursement in denars against a euro budget. Built for one organisation's actual process, not configured out of a generic tool.