Group: Donor Transaction and Contact System

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On the FSF's High Priority Projects list there is a call for the creation of a donor transaction and contact system. This section of the wiki is to help organize our efforts to either find, customize, or create such a system.

Please add yourself, below, if you are interested in helping with any aspect of this high-priority project.

Feel free to add new projects. Help draft specifications for a new project or to help guide the customization of an existing system.

People

FLOSS Foundations Effort

FLOSS Foundations, which is a loosely organized, large group of FLOSS-related Non-Profit organizations, have started an email list to discuss creation of new non-profit management software: http://lists.flossfoundations.org/mailman/listinfo/foundations-software

There are also notes on this topic from their last annual meeting: http://flossfoundations.org/notes-floss-foundations-oscon-2008

Existing projects

Apache OFBiz

The Apache Open For Business Project is an open source enterprise automation software project that includes: Open Source ERP, Open Source CRM, Open Source E-Business / E-Commerce, Open Source SCM, Open Source MRP, Open Source CMMS/EAM, and more. It can be used out of the box, or to create specialized solutions.

Features

  • Advanced e-commerce and catalog management including a complete CMS
  • Complete promotion, pricing, and order management system (sales & purchase)
  • Customer management and order fulfillment modules
  • Accounting system and other business management features
  • Maturing Point Of Sales (POS) module using XUI as rich client interface

Flaws

  • Security Issues (XSRF, XSS, Session Hijacking): exploitation and mitigation See Issue Tracker
  • DBCP Connection Pool Issues See Issue Tracker
  • As a business automation package and not specifically a donor transaction and contact system, using Open For Business may require modification of the software when using it for this purpose.

Usage Examples


CiviCRM

CiviCRM is a Constituent Relationship Management system designed specifically for non-profits. The software can easily integrate into the popular content management systems: Joomla or Drupal. With the available civicontribute module CiviCRM will work as both a contact and donation management system.

Features

  • Allows for storage of common nonprofit contact data (individuals, organizations, and households) that support donor management, case management, voter, and advocacy applications
  • CiviCRM is highly configurable and in most cases can be configured to work with existing business processes.
  • Designed for the civic sector. CiviCRM was designed for use by non-governmental organizations that engage in advocacy, community and political organizing, and non-profit work.
  • CiviCRM integrates directly into the popular open source CMS’s Drupal and Joomla. Web site registrations automatically become CiviCRM records and individuals can maintain their own CRM record.
  • Available add-in modules such as civicontribute, civimail, civievent, and civimemeber make CiviCRM one system that is well suited to both contact management and donor management.

Flaws

  • The code is somewhat convoluted, so be prepared to have some difficulties debugging (should it be necessary). However, response from the developers is quite fast at the CiviCRM forum.
  • The web interface is somewhat sluggish.
  • From the project site there seems to be users experiencing issues with search functions (problems searching users).

Usage Examples

  • Amnesty International. Using CiviCRM to collect website registration
  • Linux Foundation. Using CiviCRM with CiviMember and CiviEvent. The Linux Foundation is now able to receive individual membership dues online.
  • Fundraising Wikimedia: Wikimedia Foundation uses CiviCRM for their fundraising efforts.


OffstageArts

OffstageArts provides integrated management functionality for arts and other non-profit organizations. It integrates all organizational functions in one place: development, marketing, event management, school and ticket sales.

Features

  • Software includes features for: Contact Management, Organizational Development, Marketing, Donor Management, Schools, Open Classes, Accounting, Ticket Sales
  • Efficiency is improved through the automation of routine tasks. All customer, donor and other constituent interactions are tracked; every ticket sale, every student enrollment, every donor pledge, etc.
  • Efficiency of scarce marketing resources is improved through advanced data mining techniques based upon all available data.
  • On-line ticketing is taken in-house, allowing organizations to maintain control of customer data while avoiding third-party per-ticket fees.
  • Designed with non-profit use in mind, and includes features that will work well for some non-profit business models. This one will specifically work well for arts-focused businesses.

Flaws

  • Fairly Arts focused and may not be the right tool for businesses outside of this realm. Customization of the software will likely be required for those outsides of arts/art-schools categories.
  • Smaller community of developers than most other systems on our list. Also there is no link to a specific community/support site from their website.
  • With Java as the basis for Off Stage Arts, and SVN being required even to get the software, less technical users will have more trouble with this one. On the other hand though, the system is well documented.

Usage Examples


Grace

Grace Contribution Manager

The Grace Contribution Manager handles the tracking of contributions and donors for a non-profit organization. As contributions come in for particular funds, the contribution is recorded along with the donor's information. Grace also handles the printing of receipts & reports and facilitates common administrative operations like bank deposits and exporting of data to an accounting package.


Features

  • Create a deposit and enter contributions into that deposit.
  • Multiple line items (recipients) possible for each contribution.
  • Streamlined data entry and finalizing of a deposit.
  • Create multiple funds to receive contributions.
  • Print receipts for donors.
  • Print reports for fund owners (or output to PDF).
  • Export to external accounting system.
  • Notify fund owners by email of contributions.
  • Multiple, concurrent users with extensive logging.
  • Copy deposits for easy re-entry of repeated sets of contributions.
  • Rapid, extensive search for deposits, contributions, and donors.
  • Runs on 32-bit and 64-bit GNU/Linux (tested on Debian and Ubuntu)

Rapport

Rapport is a donor and volunteer management application (in progress). The ultimate goal for Rapport is create a system suitable for use as a hosted service, or installable on an end-user's server. Of course, it will provide a variety of features for managing contacts, recording donations, sending email, etc.

ON NGO Membership

This project aims at creating web based member management software for NGOs, based on Grok and PostgreSQL. The functionality will, at first, include handling of member's addresses, contact options, a variety of member stati, and possibly payment of membership fees.

In the medium term, self-service and functionality like campaign support are desired.

The project will also contain a collection of programs specific for use by the FFII, which may or may not be useful to the general public.

]project-open[

]po[ is a Web-based ERP/Project Management software for organizations with 2-2000 users. ]po[ integrates areas such as CRM, sales, project planning, project tracking, collaboration, timesheet, invoicing and payments.

Features

  • Project templates, planning, tracking, & reporting
  • Risk Management, finance, profit & loss, project invoicing
  • Financial reporting, accounting export
  • Customer contacts
  • Interaction History
  • Online Web Registration
  • Customer tracking & classification
  • Customer Status Engine
  • Employee Payroll, skills, recruiting, portraits
  • Automatic Invoices

Compier

License: MPL

Compiere encompass ERP functionalities, but in order to avoid the duplication of information and the need for synchronisation, it's organized in a different way. Compiere modules are: Quote-to-Cash, Requisition-to-Pay, Customer relationship management, Partner Relations Management, Supply Chain Management, Performance Analysis, Warehouse, Double-entry Book-keeping, Work-flow-Management and Web Store.

ERP5

ERP5 is a free Enterprise Resource Planning system based on the Zope application server. It is mainly developed in the Python programming language.

License: GPL


OpenTaps

Version 1.0 was released in March 2008 and is a complete enterprise application platform that brings together ERP, CRM, business intelligence, and mobility integration. Opentaps 1.0 includes Customer Relationship Management (CRM); Enterprise Resource Planning; Financials and Accounting, Inventory, Warehouse, and Manufacturing; Purchasing; integrated Online and Point Of Sales stores. It also includes tools for integration with external applications, and mobile devices are supported via SOAP, and XML-RPC.


SugarCRM

Need more info about Sugar.

GNU Calendula

The Calendula project is still in the planning stage; a requirements document and other background information are available through CVS.


Flouzo

Using our experience on the Ryzom.org campaign, we want to foster the creation and setup of community-driven online donation campaigns. With Flouzo, we want to create a plateform where anyone with a good idea can setup an online donation campaign. We provide - under a Free Software license - all the tools that we needed or dreamed of when we had to run such campaigns : certification, payment methods, communication tools, money meter, etc. (Read more...)

Specifications/Major-issues/desired features

One of the biggest issues facing non-profits is the ability to do large mailings. This often requires a lot of RAM, bandwidth, and server space. This is something most non-profits can not afford. Therefore, when taking into consideration the software used for contacting donors, we should also consider systems/web-services that will allow non-profits to pool hardware resources to do mailings together. Many non-profits are seduced into using proprietary network services due to these kind of cost/space/bandwidth constraints.

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