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They should only go with custom code up to a certain extent. The organization should have the freedom to choose its own service provider (including volunteers). I'm probably stating the obvious, but if there is too much custom code they will be forced to spend a lot to rewrite code when volunteers rotate (and most likely will want to roll their own fancier solution), spend a lot of energy/time/money to maintain the code, or have difficulties finding volunteers who want to get involved in such a mess.

I don't know the specifics of your use-case, but CiviCRM is a Free Software contact relationship management software aimed specifically at non-profits. It has a large community of users and developers. While the community mostly operates on non-profit budgets, it includes users such as the FSF, EFF, Wikimedia, sub-orgs of UNESCO, Amnesty International, NY State Senate, etc. I use it for my small local clients, but I'm happy to be able to pool ressources with such organisations.

While turn-key tools can only do so much, you would probably have better chances of customizing that to fit your needs, and in the long term, the organization can turn to specialized service providers if necessary, without restarting from scratch.

Heck, worst case, if your volunteers are PHP-averse and don't feel like spending too much time customizing the application, you can write just a front-end application to it, and use the CiviCRM REST API to store the data. Writing a whole new application just for that seems like a huge waste of ressources, and does not seem sustainable. An event management tool has a ton of small but critical features to think about.

If they think it will be hard to learn an existing generic tool, imagine how hard it will be for new staff/volunteers to use a completely custom tool. Not to mention that if your organisation has an aim of promoting common good, community building, etc, they should also participate in existing Free Software projects :)

https://civicrm.org/ is extraordinarily powerful for community work. It can deal with any number of different organizing needs from paying for classes to calendaring, from constituent matters to membership sites. Check it out. I'm currently working to make civiCRM work as a law practice management solution. It needs some significant tweaking to make it work for that purpose, but for you needs it will probably work "out of the box" so to speak. Like any major software package it requires setting up, but there a lots of people around the world who have experience setting it up, you can even just pay to get the settings you want.

This is an impressive open source CRM platform that is absent from the list.
http://civicrm.org/
It can be used in conjunction with Drupal or Joomla.

I would use CiviCRM [1] and WordPress if there were no other constraints. I am of course assuming that your town wants to be able to do email outreach, has events, and likely could use case management to handle citizen requests. If not, then there is little point in using CiviCRM or anything besides a plain CMS.

I personally would prefer seeing town meeting summaries as blog posts then PDFs (which is what most towns seem to do currently).

Although if you really have NO budget, then I guess WordPress.com hosted or Google Sites.

[1] http://civicrm.org/

http://civicrm.org/casestudy/node/1390
"New York State Senate's Bluebird: Managing millions of constituents for 62 New York State Senate offices ... With the backing of CiviCRM's community of developers, Bluebird's increased functional capabilities, streamlined workflows and refined user interface promises to move the State of New York forward and help improve the communication of representative governmentâs ultimately making the Senate more responsive to constituent needs. ... Several open source CRM solutions were evaluated as platforms to help improve the New York State Senate's communication and responsiveness to constituent needs through streamlined workflows, increased functional capabilities and a user interface built on principles of simplicity and efficiency. CiviCRM stood out from the other available platforms due to it's robust feature set, open source license, eager and thriving community of developers and cooperative core team."

The code is here:
https://github.com/nysenate

If CiviCRM/Bluebird can't do what the questioner asks, the feature could be added. It is a web-based PHP/Drupal application. The NYS Senate's technology group (a great group of people, who also run "Capitol Camp" http://blog.capitolcamp.org/ ) sometimes has openings for more open source developers, so for any expert PHP/Drupal developers out there who want to work in public service on open source, you might want to get your resume on file with them.
http://groups.drupal.org/node/179504

Do you folks know much about CiviCRM? http://civicrm.org/

It is an amazingly powerful free, open-source tool not unlike Salesforce.com. It works well with both Drupal and Joomla, and in fact evolved from Howard Dean's DeanSpace. Doonesbury even made fun of it, back in the day. It really is a great tool for non-nefarious purposes. And also...

You can visit that link, and log into an actual live back-end demo, with you as the admin. This gives you a chance to see how it works and what is there. AFAIK, when Bob Smith wants to run for Senate and starts forming an organisation, which means a CRM-type telephone directory plus donor-tracking and accounting. The Bob Smith Campaign Professionals already know about CiviCRM. I heard Hillary used it for her Presidential campaign to give you an idea. Lots of folks running for office use CiviCRM, but not all of course. I'd like to know what the free open-source alternatives are.

CiviCRM has fields to store anything and everything the Republicans/Democrats want to keep track of. You can keep track of Bob's relations like who his sister is. If she died already. How much Bob has donated money for, maybe he's a subscription member, and what I find most-interesting is they have fields to keep track of most-pressing issues like gun-rights or birth-control.

They Know, and they work hard to keep track.

You mean like CiviCRM?
http://civicrm.org/

There are a lot of not for profits. Some do have a good deal of money and pay their people very well.
Others are manned by dedicated people that work for a lot less than they could other places.
It really all depends.
I some how thing the NRA pays some it's workers really well.

Just curious, but:

Have you looked at CiviCRM?

If so, in what areas did you find to be lacking? What are your criteria for a "great" CRM solution?

Your needs may vary, but for our organization, Civi turned out to be superior to the commercial solutions available.

I'm currently in the process of helping a medium sized international NGO migrate from Salesforce to CiviCRM.

During our requirements analysis we found that:

• Salesforce, while certainly powerful and flexible, is really designed with business users in mind, which leads to some ugly hacks when it comes to some basic things that non-profits need
• For the features we were interested in, CiviCRM was on par with Raiser's Edge
• CiviCRM came out ahead in online donation processing, ability to create custom web forms, and ease of use
• CiviCRM is tightly integrated with the Drupal content management system, which we were already using for several websites
• CiviCRM is Open Source, free of charge, and has great community and commercial support

Do yourself a favor, and give it a look.

> I wonder what it would take to tweak a FOSS solution to fit this need.

Uh, yeah. Done. The FOSS answer to this is called CiviCRM. Works pretty well, but it's always a question of meeting organization needs to the tech solution -- YMMV. http://civicrm.org/aboutcivicrm

My org (nonprofit, ~1.5M annual budget, data creators) uses Salesforce.com, which is donated to us gratis by the Salesforce Foundation. Saelsforce.com is the shit. Common Ground is just a rebranded version of Salesforce.com, presumably because people in the social sector are opposed to both sales and force.

Try CiviCRM, http://civicrm.org./ It's AGPL, good community, great devs. We've implemented it for a few medium-large organisations and it works nicely.

Not sure it integrates with Outlook, but mailing contacts can be done directly from the software (so that it appears in the history of that contact). Allows to receive donations, event registration, grant management, case management, mail blasts, etc. If you have a large member community and website, it can integrate with Drupal and Joomla. For example, we often integrate it with Organic Groups, or grant special Drupal roles depending on the membership.

Try CiviCRM - its based on the CiviSpace distribution of Drupal (the open source LAMP CMS).

You should check CiviCRM, http://civicrm.org/

Try http://ngoinabox.org/, They offer four versions, but the most apropos is their Base Edition, with more detailed info here http://base.ngoinabox.org./ For donation tracking, the component they use is CiviCRM - http://civicrm.org/.

That's what I mean- why does a user need to know PHP, CSS or HTML to use Joomla? Isn't the whole point that they don't have to? I've done a Joomla install so that I can play with CiviCRM. I have it all up and running and I'm messing around with setting up different stuff on the CiviCRM side. So far I have used absolutely zero PHP, CSS or HTML. And it all works. I've done the same with Drupal as the underlying component.
 
I guess if I wanted to create my own plugin, or my own template I might need to become familiar with those things, but not to use it - not to use any of the templates others have already made available. I feel pretty confident that I could also hand over what I've done to someone else and with very little training they could be a proficient user of both pieces of software.

a huge amount of time, effort or money to http://civicrm.org/ i guess that would be ok. then some volunteer can make them a cute pinkish template, and whoopsa!

Well CiviCRM actually, because Deanspace never went away.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deanspace

As I understand it, Howard Dean used open source LAMP w/ Drupal and built an impressive organizational CRM/ event / fund-raising system for his Democratic presidential run in 2004. Once his campaign finished, he donated back to the community, and funded http://www.civicrm.org/ (but please do not mistake my trivial understanding for definitive fact).

If you ever wonder what those national political campaigns used for robo-dialing-CRM, there's a demo online for your trial use.

Civicrm forked awhile ago, and now drupal is not required, because CiviCRM also runs on Joomla now. (But I suggest you look closely at Drupal anyway).

"Can't seem to remember OSS being used by any other presidential candidate in the past, ever."

DrupalEd is a new distribution of the Drupal CMS. While I haven't used it in an educational environment, I have at one time or another used all of the contributed modules included in it. Installing DrupalEd -- as opposed to installing the Drupal base and then all of the contributed modules -- saves somewhere between 10-30 hours, depending on the skill of the person installing it.

Drupal can be made to do just about anything you want, so adding more functionality like ERP, PubCookie, LDAP integration, etc. isn't a problem. CiviCRM is, in my opinion, a must-have for most organizations and small- to mid-sized businesses.

A discussion about DrupalEd's release and what it's all about can be found in the Drupal forums and at the DrupalEd working group. More about distributions and install profiles can be found at the Distribution profiles group.