The Founder
Richard Schuder
Founder & Principal Architect
I've spent more than two decades building technology solutions across industries — from enterprise infrastructure to education platforms to organizational management systems. Early in that career, I kept running into the same problem at the advocacy and legal organizations I worked with: they were doing extraordinarily important work, but their intake processes were held together with spreadsheets and hope.
The available tools were built for collecting survey responses — not managing the complex, time-critical cases that advocacy organizations deal with daily. When someone contacts a civil rights organization, they're often in crisis. When they fill out an intake form, that form shouldn't be the last thing the organization's system does. It should be the first thing in a managed process that follows through to resolution.
So I built ALIS. Not as a startup play or exit strategy — but because the organizations doing this work deserved a proper tool. I began building ALIS in 2014, and by 2015 it was live with our first affiliate — the ACLU of Nevada. Since then, ALIS has grown to 25+ affiliate installations entirely through word of mouth. Every client came through a referral from another organization that had seen what ALIS could do.
That's the proof I'm most proud of.