Here's an interesting white paper I ran across a few months back when I started with Care2 and was slated with the duty of becoming the Salesforce czar. Salesforce is a nifty little Customer Relationship Management asp that helps sales teams divvy up work and stay on top of their sales strategies. In nonprofit speak, it could be used for membership or donor tracking, and is referred to as Constituent Relationship Management. Same difference. Although Salesforce is not really designed for nonprofits, yet, I believe it's free to use if you're a nonprofit (they probably charge for larger orgs), and it's fairly customizable. We use it for both Care2's nonprofit partner management and for the Moving Ideas Network (www.movingideas.org) of over 180 nonprofits, a site we adopted from the American Prospect a couple of months ago.
I digress. The point is not to necessarily pitch Salesforce--they don't really need it and there are other competitors out there that do the same thing and are probably better suited to nonprofit needs--but to recommend that if you don't have some sort of membership and donor management system, you should find one. GetActive and Democracy in Action come to mind. Care2 uses GetActive to deliver gazillions of petitions and emails and letters to Congress, and Moving Ideas uses Democracy in Action to deliver email newsletters and action alerts. Both have their advantages and deserve a look.
There are a lot of great cheap or free resources out there for nonprofits, too. TechSoup is another good place to start for researching technical tools of all types. Software companies like Microsoft and Adobe will offload excess stock at a low low price, no doubt for the tax write-off, and you can even find refurbished and recycled hardware.
And back to the point that inspired this little ditty: if you'd like to see what Salesforce should perhaps be able to do for nonprofits, read this white paper published by Exponent Partners a few months ago: http://www.exponentpartners.com/mambo/images/stories/PDFs/salesforce.com
_nonprofit_play.pdf
Feel free to add your two cents in the comments section below if you'd like to speak about any of the above tools or know of others that might be helpful to nonprofit organizations. What CMS do you use? What are the pros and cons?
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