Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
Yep. I work for a chain of not for profit hospitals and I know the folks who handle donor contributions use salesforce.com. Have been for years. Do not know what they like / dislike about it. But the years of use doe's say something. The only thing is it can be bandwidth intensive on your internet pipe.
If you are working for a non profit how do you have customers? Why not get a real job and [produce some worthless product that nobody needs] instead of [offering to help out those in need and asking little in return]? Just askin.
Fixed that for you.
Oh my, I shouldn't feed the troll, but this pisses me off.
This particular troll apparently has no idea of what non-profits do or what they do for people at large. Go ahead, pick something that you might care about...I bet there's a non-profit (probably several) that either helps or advocates on your behalf. Let's try this game, shall we?
Emergency relief? How about the Red Cross for one?
Health issues? Too many to mention.
How about the military? Adopt a Platoon. Paralyzed Veterans of American...many many more.
Firefighters and Police? You bet they're covered.
That's just a small sampling and some of the bigger names in the industry. There are thousands more. And they all have donors and supporters who care about that particular thing. You are way off the mark about it not being a "real job". Most of the people that work at non-profits work long hours and far harder than you sitting on your ass cruising Slashdot. And they do it for a pittance of pay because it's something they care about.
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?
You laugh, but for a small business, backups are tough. Some "enterprise" software that is vital to their business for example, will depend on registry keys, services, processes set up to run as a particular user with particular rights, etc. I've dealt with these situations, and setting up a "reasonable" backup solution on a budget is extraordinarily more complex when you're talking about software that is vital to their business.
And in this case, excel is great because it's one file. If they copy it, burn it, put it somewhere, they KNOW it's backed up. It's there. Same goes for TXT. They can test it by taking their one file and opening it up on another machine. Does it work? Yes. It's there.
But for more complicated software, holy crap. One solution I came up for an anonymous small business whose computers were stolen was to replace all their desktops with Virtualbox VMs, set every client and the server to save state, copy all the Virtualbox files to a second folder, and then resume state at 3:00AM. For a backup, I have a batch file on the autorun list for a couple eSATA/USB2 hard drives that they can plug in, click "copy back up" and then it's done in a few minutes to half an hour. They can take the hard drive home. They can do it any time during the day on at least one client and the server.
But frankly, everything else I've seen is that "enterprise" and "business" software is so mind-bogglingly poorly written that unless backing up is an option of the program, and sometimes (in my case) even if it's an option, you'll be regretting not coming up with a sane, easy, fast, painless backup solution right off the bat.
And that's why excel files, txt files, anything that minimizes the filesystem footprint, is awesome. In my case, I had to wrap their business software in a VM.
I've worked with a number of non-profit's as an IT-Consultant who are small enough that I *am* the IT-department. Some have used in house spreadsheets and file-maker databases, but both Tessitura and Raisers Edge are the two big products that I've seen and worked with. Both do what a non-profit needs to do. But, it's all about your budget.
Currently, I have one non-profit who is splitting Tessitura between 2 other non-profits. Cost sharing it makes it something reasonable for all three. It's hosted at a central site for them and there's someone in charge of all three data sets. It's something I'd suggest considering if you are really interested in one of the better products.
Good luck!
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]