Smaller, lighter tools for nonprofits

I'm a nonprofit advocacy guy -- PIRG, Sierra Club. There's a huge need for tools that small to medium sized nonprofits can use to help them with backend operations. Eg, member databases -- Salsa et al are very expensive and deployment costs are high for small group. Or financial mangement -- Quickbooks is also expensive. Even basic IT tasks.

There's a lot of activity around nonprofit software and tech tools. It seems focused on how to use technology to *add* to what nonprofits are doing, which is great. There is an equal or greater need for tools to help nonprofits make their core business operations more efficient and robust, and a need to educate staffers on the tools that already exist. How many nonprofit people know about GIMP?

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Brad Johnson commented 2011-11-15 19:19:12 -0500
Hey Adriel, thanks for the response. Looking forward to seeing you at the Blue Key Tweetup on Thursday. I’ve seen Nation Builder — the pricing is certainly right. In the past I’ve used Drupal for small one-off things, but finding a drupal template that works for what you want seems impossible. I don’t want to invest in learning how to make drupal themes. A friend is running an assembly campaign and I sent him NB’s bit about the comparison to VAN. Don’t like the VAN anyway, to be honest. It just seems too hard to use for basic things.

Thanks for the tip about picnik — looks interesting and I’ll check it out. I just got turned onto bootstrap from twitter — . Looking forward to seeing how that works.
Brad Johnson tagged this with Important 2011-11-15 19:01:35 -0500
Adriel Hampton commented 2011-11-15 19:01:26 -0500
Agreed, Brad. For CMS, CRM and action tools, NationBuilder (I work there and the software powers Adriel Nation) is pretty sweet, starting at just $19 a month for smaller organizations. For photo software, I am using picnik.com a lot these days.
Brad Johnson published this page in Suggestions 2011-11-07 19:14:53 -0500