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Customer Resource Management For Non-Profits?
NoTerminal writes "My 60-person non-profit organization is looking for a tool or set of tools to keep track of our donors and contacts. A perfect solution will either replace or gracefully synchronize with Outlook's contacts module, as well as provide a powerful back-end that can handle donation tracking, grant reporting, and interaction tracking. What contact management system or customer relations management package is your non-profit using? How do you like it?"
Specifically the Raiser's Edge. Seems to do most of what you need.
salesforce provides free service to registered nonprofits. as you probably know, salesforce is an incredibly robust and extensible CRM system. it can be tweaked pretty easily. if anything, it might be too heavyweight. but it will certainly get the job done.
I am not sure how big your budget is, but I've heard nothing but good things about Tessitura:
http://www.tessituranetwork.com/Products.aspx
There is also Raiser's Edge - but their product (in my opinion) feels like it was put together by a programmer (i.e. - written to bad specs by someone whose job isn't fundraising), not by a user - and thus has lots of quirks that make it not as useful as it should be...
http://www.blackbaud.com/products/fundraising/raisersedge.aspx
I mentioned tinker-toys once in a post - now I'm modded down for life.
It's pretty much the industry standard. I work for a 501(c)3 non-profit with a $15 million a year budget. It's Windows only, but I'm not aware of any open source solution that includes all of the industry specific knowledge that Raisers Edge does.
It's not cheap by any stretch.
If you want cheap then Orange Leap has an open source "Community Edition" of their CRM that comes with no support.
I totally disagree.. To me it seems powerful, simple, and very flexible. Japan Post, Starbucks, Dell, all customers... Non-profits get 10 licenses and over 4,000 nonprofits use it. http://www.salesforce.com/foundation/ Worth a look at least.
You might want to try hosted Microsoft CRM which is available pretty cheap per seat.
Just sugarcrm.
Its direct, integrates well with excel and outlook. I mean, im baffled that very few mentioned it here.
Sugar is the way to go.
I have to suffer salesforce and, FOR OUR NEEDS, it sucks infront of sugar. And thats that.
NO SIG
Salesforce.com is a pretty amazing platform for doing CRM that goes well beyond just donor management. As others have mentioned, the Salesforce Foundation makes it available from free-to-darn-cheap. It has good Outlook/Office integration, and unlike most other solutions Salesforce has an really solid Web Services API that makes it possible to integrate with all kinds of other systems, notably including Plone, the open-source CMS system that many nonprofits use. ONE/Northwest, the nonprofit I work for, has done a ton of work in this area, and has had great success at delivering powerful, easy-to-use solutions to mid-sized environmental nonprofits.
www.sugarcrm.com or sugarforge.org - They offer commercial and free open source versions and there are a number of free & pay plugins. Works well on your server or theirs.
OpenERP (http://openerp.com/) has an integrated CRM. I've had great success with this project and the database is completely accessible via XML-RPC if you need custom functions. I've also used SugarCRM, but am not nearly so enamored with that project.
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/.
http://www.nten.org/ has done reports comparing CMS for nonprofits, including a great comparison of drupal, joomla & plone. Beth's blog, techsoup and netsquared are great resources additionally, you could look into using another serive like donor's resource, firstgiving, givezooks, Mysamaris, and Razoo- most of which have a free option Raiser's Edge, like anything Blackbaud is really great if you can afford it. But I would start at the source of research and read the reviews- they are seriously helpful!
I work as a DB consultant for a non-profit that does CRM-Database and Web consulting for other non-profits. We've developed in a variety of platforms and have done everything from custom built solutions through Salesforce, so I'm pretty familiar with the turf. My tips:
1. Raiser's Edge is a nice product with relatively easy entry, but its REALLY tough to master, and, as is true with most systems I've worked with, reporting is still more an art than a science. It's expensive, support is expensive, maintenance is expensive.
2. Salesforce is our preferred platform at the moment. Low barrier to entry (10 seat license for free for 501c(3)), alot of training available free of charge, and with some tweaking, a good non-profit overlay for it's sales-centric backend. Their current NP Template is severely lacking (we have our own package we use) although they've got some momentum behind it lately, and I expect it to improve dramatically over the next few releases. We do alot of customization work on this platform, and its pretty flexible, nice API, great plug-in for Eclipse and the OO language (Apex) they use for the API layer is derived from Java. I wasn't sold at first, but its really grown on me as a platform. Reporting can still be rough though.
3. Filemaker/eBase Not worth your time, money, or frustration.
4. SugarCRM has been getting some mention in the community lately, and in my experience, may be a viable alternative, but I haven't had enough time to play with it.
5. Custom solutions are always pricey, but you should (theoretically) get what you want. MS Access (please no), SQL Server, whatever the opensource flavor of the week is- if you have a really odd-duck funding or business model, it might be worth a look.
The only reason I wouldn't recommend SF outright to you is that it's a bit finicky to setup the Outlook connector, I can't speak for the others around Outlook connectivity. OTOH, what is your CRM DB doing trying to replace your email system in the first place?
And they do it for a pittance of pay because it's something they care about.
I spend on charity, and almost never do I donate to charities that pay people to call me. I find charities that spend their money on programs, not on fundraising and administration. Some charities attract volunteer callers/canvassers - but a lot of times it's just people doing a job like any other and there's no reason to glorify what they're doing. The net effect of what they do, beyond making a living, is often going to be moving charitable funding from funding programs over to funding administration and fundraising (calling/advertising) costs.
Honestly, many charities are basically a business that produces calls for donation. For example, "Angel Flight West" sounds like a great charity: "Arranging free air transportation in response to health care and other compelling human needs".
Then you see that only 31.1% of donations go towards the actual program and the rest is lost to administration and fundraising costs (link). Now I'm not saying they aren't trying to good work, or that charities in general aren't doing good work - but I do think there's justification at being frustrated with how many charities are run.
To balance out my last example, look at Food For The Poor. 96.8% of their incoming funds goes to the program.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
How about Drupal + this module: http://drupal.org/project/civicrm
Guide to Dynamics CRM 4.0 Editions and Licensing http://www.techsoup.org/stock/dtjumppages/microsoft/crm_editions.asp
I work for a 45k-50k member non-profit. We have a staff of around 100 and a 4 person IT department. We use CiviCRM for event registrations. Our main member database is MS SQL with VB.NET apps and horrid Filemaker applications held over from when this was an all Apple shop. I've tried to push for migration to CiviCRM and making contributions to the project to get CiviCanvas. We currently use GetActive for email contact. We currently have our main website contracted out hosted with an ASP based CMS. Drupal with CiviCRM could eliminate several of our internal and contracted applications. My only complaint with CiviCRM is that getting templates to work nicely with both Drupal and the CiviCRM portion seems to be difficult.
Check out Donor Perfect, which for a very small organization can be licensed for like $50. It's amazingly powerful for such a small price.
For larger organizations, the price goes up. It does everything you're asking for, except (perhaps) the Outlook sync. I don't know if it does that.
And although I hate Intuit, check out Quickbooks for Non-Profits. The only reason I'm suggesting this is because love-them-or-hate-them, Quickbooks is the defacto account software for small organizations and their non-profit module ain't bad. Plus, if you're outsourcing your accounting, they'll appreciate that you're on QB.
-David
My solution requires, literally, them to merely plug in a hard drive with a batch file already on it, and then make a single click.
And no, it was for a very small business that doesn't need or want an IT department to manage its computers. Performance hit? The new computers were six years newer than the ones stolen. If they noticed a performance hit, they only told me about how much faster their computers were.
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.
I also work for a nonprofit organization, and TechSoup is an invaluable resource. They offer software and hardware that has been donated by various companies (such as Sage, Microsoft, Symantec, Cisco, Intuit, and many others) that is only available for nonprofits. They do have CRM software buried in there somewhere. I strongly suggest you check it out, especially for things such as antivirus, where it can save literally thousands off of existing charity pricing.