PILOT @ TWO CENTS
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The Keystone Pilot at Two Cents
Considerations for Nonprofit Leadership
The Keystone Pilot is an invitation to participate in the early development of a fully optimized collaborative workspace for affordable housing clients.
Designed to give your team practical experience in a “modern” workspace we bring support and guided learning to hands-on practice with live demos using your portfolio data. Our tools have evolved over the last five years with field-testing and insights informed by 30 years of industry expertise.
The Pilot is a learning and building path to prepare for realistic expectations using AI while controlling costs and building with a security-first approach. We’ve created a low-risk, high-reward sandbox that leans into native Microsoft apps and integrations that you already pay for.
What we deliver is truly too unique to provide comparable pricing. We can confidently tell you that the pilot's cost of $12,000 is a fraction of the value you’ll gain.
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Changing Winds
We’ve all faced the forecast of new software. We’ve done our best, usually with a lot of uncertainty. Now we face the age-old question while we are adapting to a new weather system.
Learn to Build?
or
Learn to Buy?
That is the question.
Our pilot is not about selling you Microsoft. You already pay for it. This is about learning what it’s capable of. This is all about your team feeling it has the potential to become a sophisticated and powerful toolbox? Or an overwhelming and bewildering frontier.
The Keystone Pilot gives you the direct experience and extended exposure and access to info and webinars that will help to empower your decision-making, equipped with critical thinking and awareness of how to assess technical debt.
Learning to Build
(Move to Your Environment)
Goal: Operate your own portfolio Dataverse, build your own apps and Copilot agents.
During the Pilot: Your portfolio data was connected to apps, dashboards, and Copilot agents inside of The Arc. Unleashed from your PM software and liberated from Excel workbooks, your team could see the value of a central data repository to create well-informed tools and agents. By skipping hundreds of hours of governance, admin and data set-up, your team could gather momentum, thinking about roles of AI Practitioners and Expert Builders
After the Pilot: You will be ready to proceed with migrating your tables to your own Microsoft tenant. You’ll have a few free samples of Two Cents’ products, but what you’re really buying is the freedom to design your own.
Deliverable: Database Schema Components (See Exhibit A2 and Use Agreement. Certain configurations and options may trigger additional costs.)
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Learning to Buy
(Stay in Our Environment)
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Goal: Evaluate any vendor, any platform, any contract — including ours.
During the Pilot: Your team showed up as Novices or Experimenters. Access to The Arc workspace and portfolio tools helped you to experience and measure our tools and now you can consider your options.
After the Pilot: Your team is empowered and informed about the deliverables of AI, how to prioritize your needs, and how to review a scope of work. That discernment travels with you and you’re gonna need it.
Deliverables:
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Subscribe to The Arc for continual access to your portfolio tools.
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Purchase the Keystone Managed Solution (to be released after the Pilot)
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Pursue a scope for custom tools or managed solutions
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Take what you’ve learned to any other vendor.
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Your portfolio data is yours — available to import into your own Microsoft environment at any time, and for up to twelve months after Pilot completion.
There’s No Rush
The pilot gives you six months to absorb, explore, research and play in a sandbox of AI-driven components built for affordable housing operations, featuring your portfolio. It’s expected that you and your team will gain a better understanding of your needs, best and highest uses, and the right fit.
Changes to Microsoft's Power Platform environment are inevitable. We’ve learned to accept this, incorporate learnings, and adapt. We will encourage pilot participants to continue learning about the state of your Microsoft ecosystem, your licensing and subscriptions, and your contract with Microsoft, all of these being important considerations to be aware now, of at the time of Pilot completion, and going forward.
Free The Data
Is a personal mission
and a pledge
that we back up with a Continuity Right
to ownership (with a use agreement)
in the pilot contract.
The options we offer
are meant to provide Clients
with lasting deliverables
in many forms.
The Learning Path
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We are all on it. Are you leading? Following? Getting out of the way? Needless to say, for mission-based work there is a new urgency afoot and the last thing we needed was a whole new set of global impacts.
Time waits for no one, and the decisions you make about your tech stack over the next two years will shape everything about how you manage your operations, staff, and portfolio.
​Software has not been an easy win for our work. Keeping up with funding portals at HUD websites or allocating agencies has always been the push, and the QAP has defied any thought of standardizing a model. We’ve done our best with property management accounting software, but it was never built for us. Investor reporting demands added another layer of financial acumen rarely expected by public programs.
A hierarchy of needs and nuances have made it impossible to unify our tools as we navigate layered regs and agency policies; analytics and KPIs; legal docs; audit requirements; facilities and utilities; partnership and real estate concerns; and on top of everything: a layer of security, governance and access.
The complexity only grows. At a minimum, each affordable housing project requires a state agency, a syndicator or investor, a general partner and a property manager, and each deal is a Ven diagram of tech and SOPs. We’ve built what we could on our own, and we’ve paid outside vendors for what we couldn’t.
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The Keystone Solution has aimed for this exact intersection of shared portfolio management needs and one almost universally shared platform: Microsoft. The Keystone Pilot gives nonprofits a chance to find the right fit and pace, based on your capacity. Not only to see what is possible, but to land on what is feasible.
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Please ask for more details about the pilot process, deliverables and options at completion. Regardless of the path you choose: by the end of the Pilot, you will own your portfolio data in clean, structured, related tables; imported to your own Microsoft environment; and ready to go whenever you are.
