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Hosting

No matter how much you know about hosting, you never can be quite sure you're making the perfect decision. There are a lot of options out there and heaps of variables to consider. Unless you have (or plan on) tens of thousands of users per day or more, hosting can cost less than $10 / month, and some hosting providers offer free services to nonprofits.

There are a few large, stable companies out there with sophisticated (and mostly non-technical) control panels, like 1and1.com, Dreamhost, Network Solutions, and GoDaddy. We use Dreamhost and find it provides a slightly smoother, more flexible experience than the others. Dreamhost also provides free hosting to nonprofits, so that helps.

Lots of hosts offer a "Windows" or "Linux" option. You'll probably have the best luck installing and using open source tools if you go with Linux.  Don't worry, you don't have to become a guru.

CMS (Manage a Website)

The industry term for tools that you can use to manage a website -- without necessarily knowing HTML -- is "Content Management". There are two flagship open source projects that are mature, fully featured, and very extensible. We have extensive experience with both Joomla and Drupal. With these, you can rely on a large community of developers, and a wide range of documentation.

Joomla and Drupal are both great tools, both open source, both free, and both very mature products. We'd strongly recommend either one, and have plenty of experience with them.

CRM

Customer (or Constituent, or Client, or...) Relationship Management (CRM) tools are designed to help you manage people and organizations. Most of these tools were created to help sales people manage the process of landing and keeping customers in for-profit companies, but the features and functionality are a great match for many non-profits -- especially those with a base of donors or other constituents.

  • Convio is a hosted CRM/CMS package developed specifically for nonprofit organizations. Their tools include online donation forms, peer-to-peer fundraising tools, website content management, online advocacy and email outreach tools.
  • CiviCRM is an open-source CRM tool designed specifically for non-profits.
  • SugarCRM is also an open-source CRM tool, but is more general purpose and designed to compare with SalesForce.
  • SalesForce is an extremely powerful platform that has been developed for salesforce automation and income tracking for a wide range of private organization. Salesforce.com recently started making 10 licenses to their extremely powerful platform freely available to nonprofit organizations. Over 4,000 nonprofits are currently using Salesforce.com to track donor history, coordinate volunteers and even track services provided to the communities they serve.

Data Migration

It may require some technical savvy to use, but you can use Jitterbit to migrate data without needing to know how to program in any language. We've used it on a number of projects and it has us wondering why we spent so much time developing our own scripts.

Other Tools

Before you spend any money or time on custom development for your organization, be sure you aren't re-inventing the wheel.

  • OpenSourceCMS lets you search and demo a bunch of great tools without needing to install them. Give it a shot!
  • SourceForge is a great big clearinghouse of open source projects. A lower percentage will apply to non-profits than at OpenSourceCMS, but it's still definitely worth a look.