Jonah Crawford wrote:
I would be interesed in hearing what others have done with NGOs
regarding membership management, collaboration toolsets and payment
systems. Also it would be great to keep business matters - except for
the most abstract off list - I think it detracts from the tenor of the
conversation here.
Ah, my pet topic ... there is a very real need for this sort of thing ...
I recently built 2 staff/membership management systems for 2 different
NGOs that had quite a bit in common. One of the NGOs, an environmental
group, is interested in going open source, and I'm currently talking the
other one (and anyone else who will listen) about getting some
collaboration going. They are a political party. I'm willing to put some
of my own company's time in to help manage the project.
Between the two systems, here are most of the features (Note: in one
system there are contacts, staff and volunteers; in the other there are
contacts and members ):
* built on archetypes
* workflowable contacts, members & groups (we started using CMFMember
but found it unworkable, so we developed our own solution - a bit
hackish but it does the job - we will be looking closely at membrane &
Five on Plone 2.5 for the next version)
* any contact can be made into a member, and visa versa
* contacts/members can be given a login account (they get a Plone
username and password); in one client's case, they can log in and change
many of their own details, including biography, mugshot, etc; accounts
can be disabled as well
* multiple levels of authority: eg. operator, observer (read-only
access), coordinator (can read almost all info except sensitive data
such as credit card numbers), ordinary user
* groups can have managers
* groups are used for branches, campaigns, committees, roles, org.
units, physical offices, etc.
* separate physical address objects
* addresses can be physically located in "electorates" (for their
political stuff!)
* complex membership application, approval and payment workflows with
some transitions time dependent and automated (using ClockServer)
* export of users and groups to LDAP with sufficient info for
addressbook which allows authentication & group-based authorisation on
LDAP-compatible systems (with the long term aim of one username and one
password for each user throughout the organisation)
* auditing via Plone's history mechanism, augmented to record exactly
which attributes were changed by who and when
* recording of membership and donation payments (not accounting as such
- its just a basic record - accounting is left to commercial packages -
I would like to see that change - example: exporting payment data into
QIF, which could then be imported into something like gnucash)
* regular payment schedule objects that controls parts of a member's
workflow (e.g. due payments are detected, and that changes the state of
the member object)
* regular payment schedules can be used to generate a payment record and
update their next membership renewal date in a single step
* One of our clients uses Jabber quite a bit so I am currently writing
an ejabberd plugin to map LDAP groups into shared roster groups and chat
rooms (I learnt Erlang on Monday - I have the roster groups working so far!)
* use of Smart Folders to do some fairly involved queries (not a
flexible as SQL but a whole lot simple for non-tech users) eg. "all
members in electorates XYZ and ABC who are interested in basket weaving
and nuclear science and geraniums"
* export of any query results to CSV that can be opened in OpenOffice or
Microsoft Excel
* mail templates to generate (snail mail) letters to members: these
template are applied to any query results that lists members to create a
PDF file with all of the letters inside it (basically, a mail merge);
formatting is double sides with proper page boundaries,; templates can
contain images and are edited in Kupu
* mailing label templates for your snail mail: again PDF; users can
chose to generate only one label per physical address
* pre-defined queries and mail templates for due membership, overdue,
lapsed, new membership, thanking donors, etc
* contacts, members, addresses offices etc, all nicely searchable though
Plone beautiful search tools, including LiveSearch
* although not tested in practice yet, there is enough info in the LDAP
to control user accounts and mailing lists on LDAP-savvy mail servers
such as qmail and postfix; mailing lists can have extra recipients
outside of the group
* for the environmental client, this system is also the heart of their
intranet, embedded within the same plone instance - it is essentially
used as an intranet staff/volunteer directory within this context, they
also have:
* web forms for emailing or SMSing members or whole groups of members at
a time
* all the other nice Plone stuff for their intranet, like document
full-text indexing with TextIndexNG, and WebDAV
Whew that was a lot wasn't it .. probably not all either.
One of my clients is already using their system, and report that they
are very happy with it, although they would like to see new features
added in the future. The other client's system is currently be phased
in. Their admin staff are setting it up first, and according to my
client's IT manager, they report that they are "blown away" by its
capabilities. They also have more plans for improvements. Here are some
of the things being tossed around:
* instant campaign portals - this is a rather involved and ambitious
project: to grossly oversimplify, if you have a new campaign, you fill
in a form, selecting some options and adding some people and managers,
and voilà you have a functioning campaign portal
* using the LDAP, Samba and/or PAM for various authentication tasks on
Windows and 'Nix (I have already demonstrated the use of pam_ldap to
provide authentication for a demo subversion repository)
* batching and automation of payments through an secure online web
payment gateway
* geospatial features (Google maps integration anyone?)
and lots of other stuff. I think there is a great opportunity to do some
real good and drum up some good business here too. I would be interested
to hear others' experiences and needs, and if anyone wants to get in on
this project please contact me too.
Cheers,
Sam.
--
Sam Stainsby - Managing Director
Sustainable Software Pty Ltd
"open knowledge :: social conscience"
ABN: 32 117 186 286
WWW: http://sustainablesoftware.com.au/
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tel/Fax: +61 7 3289 5491 Mobile: 0405 380 844
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