I’ve decided to write down my technology recommendations that nonprofits with revenue ranging from $0 to $10 million can use. Some of these technologies scale to nonprofits that are even larger. These are part and parcel of a “best of breed” approach. What’s unique about the application stack listed on the leaderboard is that all of these technologies are pretty open (except for the MS Office suite) and that they require a very small investment in terms of capital dollars.
I’m not picking any Web 2.0 technologies yet for this stack. However, this software stack should allow a nonprofit to have a powerful presence on the Web. Like any leaderboard, the recommendations will change over time.
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I’ve just been turned on to your blog (thanks Beth!) and look forward to future reads.
Though I haven’t had much experience with Joomla, I’m getting more and more familiar with Drupal. We are working with a small group in DC called DevelopmentSeed.org and they work pretty exclusively with Drupal. And if you’re in the DC area there are Drupal meet ups every month or so. There is much more of a community here (so I’m learning) than I imagined.
Thanks.
Thanks, I hope you come early and often. Hehe. Beth is a supernode in the nptech world so I’m glad to get what links I can from her.
Unfortunately, I’m based in NYC. It’s hard to get Joomla/Drupal love out here. All the devs I’ve seen that will work with nonprofits are in Washington, DC. It’s VERY weird. Maybe when I’m in DC for NTEN NTC, I might attend a Drupal meetup.
Salesforce.com actually has an industry leading case management solution that is being used successfully by thousands of organizations. Please check it out on the salesforce.com website. The product line is called Salesforce Service & Support.
Do you have a specific link? I took a look at that product and it seems to be for sales-related CRM which is very different from the way nonprofits use a CRM. While I’m the first to admit that many of the things that nonprofits do are pretty much the same as SMBs their size, nonprofits have very specific needs in the CRM market. It’s not just a plug-and-play solution since most businesses don’t usually have a political advocacy component in their business CRMs.
How does a nonprofit approach the massive suite that is salesforce and right-size it into a usable, accessible donor database?
Good question — this is why I recommend the Ruby on Rails front-end to salesforce.com. A typical RoR front-end will allow you to customize salesforce.com to your heart’s content (or not). The workflow would run like this:
user would set the specifications
salesforce admin would set up the fields
programmer would run the front-end code on it
What’s great about RoR is its ability to rapidly prototype a front-end piece for salesforce.com that is WAY stripped down. And even better, that front-end UI can be made to look EXACTLY the way the nonprofit wants it. This means that all the salesforce admin needs to know is how to just add fields to the app. In this way, salesforce.com is just a cheap, remotely hosted database that has an admin interface which is more than halfway usable for simple field creation. You then use the RoR front-end to prototype your app (or even keep it that way). This has additional benefits — you can actually use the RoR frontend as a kind of thick client that runs on the desktop (although it really runs on the local desktop web server). This will allow your clients to run data entry screens despite the fact that the Web connection is down or even if salesforce.com is down. You’d be writing to a cached text file first and then check for salesforce.com connectivity and if it’s up and running, you then push the cached entry data over to salesforce.com.