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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?"
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?