Agreed. If there is truly no IT expertise and no budget, then I'd say a spreadsheet is what will serve them best. You can help them set it up, and they'll be much more likely to be able to manage it once your gone. No doubt it will be more error-prone and cumbersome than a relational database, but they'll understand how it works. They can set up organizational processes to make up for the lack of built-in data quality checking.
A simple relational database with a simple front end is great if there's support. It's a bane if there's not.
Yep, you're right, Salesforce is a serious contender too. Free is a very good price, but it too should be thought of as "free as in kittens". It's designed for people doing sales, not NPO fundraising, so it's missing a few things that really come in handy for many nonprofit, like tracking of couples/family units. There are good workarounds, however, which involve customizations that's best done by paying someone.
I work exclusively with NPOs and databases, and donor tracking is one of thing that nearly every organization needs. As such, it's one of the few niches where for-profits can make some money off of non-profits. So there are a ton of vultures, I mean, solutions that charge way too much for what they offer.
A lot of people mention Raiser's Edge, and I would only recommend that for large non-profits, as in $100,000,000+ annual budget. RE works best when there's a person whose whole job it is to tend to it. The software is pricey and the official Blackbaud training is outrageously exorbitant, but if you're big enough it's mostly worth it.
CiviCRM is a good possibility, but think of it as free as in kittens, not free as in beer. Expect to spend money to get it set up well, unless you're really into being a do-it-yourselfer. DIYers can be a problem for the organization in the long term, though, unless they document their work well. I usually get hired when the DIYer moves on leaving little or no information on how their homespun system works.
One non-free yet affordable solution that I've seen NPOs have experience with is GiftWorks. They're very reasonably priced, and when I met a few of the principals at a conference a few years ago, they really seemed to have their heart in the right place.
Huh? Have you ever actually used Access? It uses SQL for all data extraction and can use SQL server (or MySQL for that matter) as a back end. Access is a front end tool, and rather a good one at that. "Jet", the default back end, can do such things as subselects, something that came rather late with MySQL.
Don't confuse Access the tool with all the people who use that know nothing about structuring data well. You can normalize data in Access as easily as you can in any RDBMS.
I have "Flash Click to View" (it's wonderful, BTW), and when I entered "http://cdn.fastclick.net/fastclick.net/ffp.swf?ur l =http://www.google.ca" in FF, I still got a popup. Entering "*fastclick.net*" in Adblock worked, though.
I have an IBM ThinkPad T41. It comes with a utility, Access Connections, for managing WiFi your access points. Access Connections turns the MS firewall on or off depending the setting you choose for a given access point.
If Access Connections can do, I'm sure another program can too.
In the US, it's ILLEGAL for persons convicted of a felony (a high crime like murder, rape, etc)
That's not true. Some states, like Florida, Texas, and a few others, have that kind of law. Most don't. And it's only when the person was found guilty in a state that has such a law. So someone in Minnesota who's convicted of a felony moves to Florida, s/he still has the right to vote there. They can't be disenfranchized by the mere fact of moving to another state. But that's one thing what Florida clearly attempted to do: disenfranchize felons from states that don't prevent them from voting once they've served their time.
The whole things is laid out very clearly in "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" by Greg Palast.
It seems almost obligatory for/.ers to put down MS-Access any time it's mentioned. I frankly don't understand it. Why it is very unfortunate that such a tool is in the hands of MS and not x-platform, on it's own merits it's a very powerful front end tool. People seem to confuse Access with the novices who use it.
It has a good widget set, it has a functional scripting language, a graphical interface that's good enough for most queries you'll ever write (though it does make ugly SQL), and it has a quite complete event-based system to fire scripts from.
Where Access doesn't seem to have *any* real competition is around its reporting engine. If anyone can tell me how to get all the flexibility and ease of development in reporting that Access has in an OS tool, please tell me! I'd love to switch over.
The default data engine for Access is "Jet", which these days just comes with Windows, but you can use nearly any RDMS through ODBC or pass-through queries, including a "real" one like Postgres.
I've been following the GPL'ing of Rekall with great interest, because I do want to get out from MS's thumb. But in testing it so far I can't get past some glaring bugs (this is in the Win32 version).
Well, even if schools didn't neglect an ethics curriculum, that doesn't mean we'd all come to the same conclusion you did. Any ethics class worth anything is about critical thinking and asking questions, not what's absolutely right and wrong.
Take the case of flouridation of water and the adding of iodine to salt. Everyone within the range of distribution is forced to take those medicinal substances unless they take special action to filter their water or use sea salt. Those who pushed for this kind of thing reasoned that it was worth it to mess "with someone else's machine" for the greater social good it achieved. How many people you see with goiters these days?
Slashdot Mirror
"You can’t control what idiots will weaponize."
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/jon-stewart-rosewater-in-conversation.html
I highly recommend this quick read the 90's: http://www.amazon.com/Biology-...
It's written by a geneticist Richard Lewontin and very effectively shows the many flaws in biological determinism.
Agreed. If there is truly no IT expertise and no budget, then I'd say a spreadsheet is what will serve them best. You can help them set it up, and they'll be much more likely to be able to manage it once your gone. No doubt it will be more error-prone and cumbersome than a relational database, but they'll understand how it works. They can set up organizational processes to make up for the lack of built-in data quality checking.
A simple relational database with a simple front end is great if there's support. It's a bane if there's not.
are just what's needed to transfer your consciousness to the resurrection hub.
Yep, you're right, Salesforce is a serious contender too. Free is a very good price, but it too should be thought of as "free as in kittens". It's designed for people doing sales, not NPO fundraising, so it's missing a few things that really come in handy for many nonprofit, like tracking of couples/family units. There are good workarounds, however, which involve customizations that's best done by paying someone.
I work exclusively with NPOs and databases, and donor tracking is one of thing that nearly every organization needs. As such, it's one of the few niches where for-profits can make some money off of non-profits. So there are a ton of vultures, I mean, solutions that charge way too much for what they offer.
A lot of people mention Raiser's Edge, and I would only recommend that for large non-profits, as in $100,000,000+ annual budget. RE works best when there's a person whose whole job it is to tend to it. The software is pricey and the official Blackbaud training is outrageously exorbitant, but if you're big enough it's mostly worth it.
CiviCRM is a good possibility, but think of it as free as in kittens, not free as in beer. Expect to spend money to get it set up well, unless you're really into being a do-it-yourselfer. DIYers can be a problem for the organization in the long term, though, unless they document their work well. I usually get hired when the DIYer moves on leaving little or no information on how their homespun system works.
One non-free yet affordable solution that I've seen NPOs have experience with is GiftWorks. They're very reasonably priced, and when I met a few of the principals at a conference a few years ago, they really seemed to have their heart in the right place.
Good luck!
It could well be all you need.
http://www.faronics.com/html/deepfreeze.asp
Huh? Have you ever actually used Access? It uses SQL for all data extraction and can use SQL server (or MySQL for that matter) as a back end. Access is a front end tool, and rather a good one at that. "Jet", the default back end, can do such things as subselects, something that came rather late with MySQL.
Don't confuse Access the tool with all the people who use that know nothing about structuring data well. You can normalize data in Access as easily as you can in any RDBMS.
I have "Flash Click to View" (it's wonderful, BTW), and when I entered "http://cdn.fastclick.net/fastclick.net/ffp.swf?ur l =http://www.google.ca" in FF, I still got a popup. Entering "*fastclick.net*" in Adblock worked, though.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3647 278.stm
I have an IBM ThinkPad T41. It comes with a utility, Access Connections, for managing WiFi your access points. Access Connections turns the MS firewall on or off depending the setting you choose for a given access point.
If Access Connections can do, I'm sure another program can too.
That's not true. Some states, like Florida, Texas, and a few others, have that kind of law. Most don't. And it's only when the person was found guilty in a state that has such a law. So someone in Minnesota who's convicted of a felony moves to Florida, s/he still has the right to vote there. They can't be disenfranchized by the mere fact of moving to another state. But that's one thing what Florida clearly attempted to do: disenfranchize felons from states that don't prevent them from voting once they've served their time.
The whole things is laid out very clearly in "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" by Greg Palast.
It's already out there.
http://www.abacast.com/
It seems almost obligatory for /.ers to put down MS-Access any time it's mentioned. I frankly don't understand it. Why it is very unfortunate that such a tool is in the hands of MS and not x-platform, on it's own merits it's a very powerful front end tool. People seem to confuse Access with the novices who use it.
It has a good widget set, it has a functional scripting language, a graphical interface that's good enough for most queries you'll ever write (though it does make ugly SQL), and it has a quite complete event-based system to fire scripts from.
Where Access doesn't seem to have *any* real competition is around its reporting engine. If anyone can tell me how to get all the flexibility and ease of development in reporting that Access has in an OS tool, please tell me! I'd love to switch over.
The default data engine for Access is "Jet", which these days just comes with Windows, but you can use nearly any RDMS through ODBC or pass-through queries, including a "real" one like Postgres.
I've been following the GPL'ing of Rekall with great interest, because I do want to get out from MS's thumb. But in testing it so far I can't get past some glaring bugs (this is in the Win32 version).
Take the case of flouridation of water and the adding of iodine to salt. Everyone within the range of distribution is forced to take those medicinal substances unless they take special action to filter their water or use sea salt. Those who pushed for this kind of thing reasoned that it was worth it to mess "with someone else's machine" for the greater social good it achieved. How many people you see with goiters these days?