Overview
The National Pan-Hellenic Council of Mississippi coordinates civic engagement across the Divine Nine — nine historically Black fraternities and sororities, each with its own chapters, its own leadership, and its own way of tracking what it does.
Ahead of the November 3 election and the statewide Day of Service, the Council set a goal that sounded simple and was not: know what every chapter in Mississippi is actually doing, while it is happening, in numbers a funder would accept.
The existing method was a group text, a spreadsheet somebody volunteered to maintain, and a tally assembled after the fact. That produces a number. It does not produce an accountable one.
That's the engagement Kanonu Solutions was hired for.
Recognition
On October 24, 2026, the Mississippi State Conference NAACP selected the Stronger Together, Stronger Communities Initiative as recipient of the 2026 Goodman-Chaney-Schwerner Award, presented at the 81st Annual Freedom Fund Awards Dinner in Biloxi.
The award recognizes an individual, institution, or organization that has made outstanding contributions to strengthening political power and expanding opportunities for civic participation. It is named for Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, the three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964.
The honor belongs to the Initiative and to the chapters doing the work. Kanonu Solutions built the platform they report through.
The challenge
Coordination without authority. The Council convenes chapters; it does not manage them. Any system that required chapters to be compelled into using it was going to fail. It had to be worth opening on its own.
Nine organizations that do not share infrastructure. Each fraternity and sorority has its own national reporting line and its own culture around data. A platform that felt like surveillance from a rival organization would be dead on arrival.
Aggregate numbers, private rosters. The Council needed a public statewide picture to show momentum and satisfy funders. Chapters needed absolute certainty that names, notes, and rosters would never appear on a public page. Both, simultaneously, or neither works.
A deadline that does not move. Election day is election day. The platform had to be usable by volunteers, on phones, in the weeks when they had the least time.
Our approach
Three commitments shaped the build.
- Report what was entered, nothing more. The statewide roll-up shows exactly what chapters reported themselves. No estimates, no extrapolation, no smoothing. A number that a chapter recognizes as its own is a number it will defend.
- Public by default, private where it counts. Anyone can view the statewide dashboard with no account at all. What they see is chapter totals. Names, notes, rosters, and uploaded files are never public, and access controls enforce that at the data layer rather than in the interface.
- Provision a chapter in one step. Adding a chapter generates its full dashboard, its deliverable timeline, and its goals, and links it into the state roll-up automatically. A volunteer officer should never wait on a developer to get started.
What we shipped
A production multi-tenant civic engagement platform at strongertogether.kanonusolutions.com, running 192 reporting units across all nine Divine Nine organizations, NPHC councils, and civic partner organizations.
- A full dashboard for every reporting unit — scoreboard, deliverable timeline, weekly reporting, and strategic plan, generated automatically the moment the unit is created.
- A statewide roll-up aggregating reported figures across every participating organization, filterable by organization, county, and reporting week, with per-organization leaderboards.
- Precinct-level targeting. 1,731 Mississippi precincts mapped against 853,292 target voters, with 2022 and 2024 turnout baselines by county, a live gap calculation, and a weekly pace figure. Chapters adopt specific precincts and own them.
- County coverage against baseline across all 82 counties — where the work reached, where it did not, and what that implies for turnout.
- Goal versus actual on a weekly cadence, so a unit sees its own trajectory rather than a single end-of-cycle number.
- A rides-to-polls desk per chapter, tracking transportation commitments against goal.
- Data-quality monitoring that flags suspicious reporting — contacts concentrated in a single method, or two consecutive weeks with identical figures — so the state view stays credible rather than merely full.
- An administrator workbench surfacing which units have reported, which have gone quiet and for how long, and which deliverables are overdue, so outreach goes where it is actually needed.
- A deliverable framework matched to the actual work — registration drives at HBCUs, colleges, football games and community events; voter education forums; poll worker and poll manager training; rides to the polls; and the September 15 National Voter Registration Day push.
- Role assignment inside each unit, including Registration Lead, Education Lead, and Faith Outreach Lead.
- Two-factor authentication on every staff account, with chapter staff scoped to their own unit and state administrators scoped to the roll-up.
- A public view that requires no account and displays chapter totals only.
- Export to CSV, XLSX, DOCX and PDF, plus document import, so a unit can pull its own numbers into a national report without asking anyone.
- Installable and offline-capable, because volunteers work from phones in places with poor signal.
The outcome
Ten days out from the November 3 election, reported through the platform by the chapters themselves:
- 62,283 voter contacts logged
- 7,306 voter registrations
- 542 weekly reports submitted across the cycle
- 42 of 82 counties with reported activity
- 36 precincts formally adopted by 15 chapters
- 90 of 192 units reporting, with the rest visible and reachable rather than unknown
Beyond the figures:
- The Council can see the state while the cycle is running, not after it has ended.
- Chapters own their own numbers. Each enters its own figures, sees its own dashboard, and can export its own record for its national organization's reporting line.
- Funder reporting stopped being a reconstruction project. Coverage by county, activity by week, and goals against actuals are standing views rather than something assembled from a group text in the last week.
- Non-reporting became visible instead of invisible. The honest value of the platform is not that every unit reports; it is that the Council knows exactly which ones have not, and can call them.
- Nobody had to trust anybody with a roster. Row-level access controls mean a unit's detail is visible to that unit and the state administrators, and to no one else. The public sees totals.
- Adoption did not require enforcement. Provisioning takes one step and the dashboard is useful to a unit on its own terms, independent of whether anyone else is reporting.
A note on what's next
The multi-organization configuration is no longer theoretical. Civic partner organizations already report alongside NPHC chapters in the same state view, which is the configuration funders are most interested in: one county-level picture of civic infrastructure coverage rather than one organization's slice of it.
A reporting unit is a chapter, a branch, a youth council or a congregation. The architecture does not care which. A Faith Outreach Lead role already exists in the data model, and the NAACP recognition arrives as that expansion becomes the obvious next step.
If you're a statewide coalition, a civic organization, or a funder who needs to see coverage across a whole program rather than one grantee at a time — start a project.