OpenNGO 1.4 review

OpenNGO project is an open source project to create a set of web-based tools designed to meet the needs of small U.S

License: AGPL (Affero General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Social Source Foundation

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OpenNGO project is an open source project to create a set of web-based tools designed to meet the needs of small U.S. nonprofit organizations and non-governmental organizations across the globe.

CiviCRM is the first release of the OpenNGO project to create relationship management software for the nonprofit and nongovernmental sectors. CiviCRM stores information on the universe of people associated with a nonprofit organization and on their interactions (emails, donations, petitions, events, etc.).

The technology is designed to be lightweight, extensible, core functionality that can both stand-alone as a simple contact management application and be easily integrated with a broad variety of technologies and applications (Donation Processing, Fundraising, Advocacy/GOTV, Event Management, CivicSpace, Advokit, etc.)

Nonprofits maintain relationships with many types of constituents. They track and solicit donors, recruit volunteers, track clients, and maintain relationships with the public for advocacy purposes. They send out newsletters and invite people to events. CiviCRM enables organizations to maintain all this information in a single database, creating efficiencies and new opportunities for nonprofits to better communicate and benefit from relationships with their constituents.

Before CiviCRM, relationship management solutions have been expensive, proprietary and could not interoperate with other software. The vast majority of the NPO sector cannot afford solutions from market leaders like GetActive, Kintera, Convio and others. Solutions targeted at for-profit companies like Salesforce.com and SugarCRM do not support some of the data structures and relationships unique to the nonprofit sector like households.

The CiviCRM open source strategy radically reduces the barriers nonprofits face to deploying world-class software solutions to support their missions, increasing efficiency across the sector, not just among organizations that can afford the higher costs of proprietary solutions. The strategy further creates an ecosystem of high-level NPO-focused software targeted at fundraising, advocacy, organizing, and other specific vertical market by allowing those software developers to avoid rebuilding the wheel and simply start with a robust relationship management engine—CiviCRM.

CiviCRM is a LAMP-based (Linux, Apache, MySQL, & PHP) web application. It provides a lightweight extensible core that can be easily integrated with a broad range of existing and future modules. CiviCRM can can function both as part of an ASP-hosted product offering or as a stand-alone application within the context of a single enterprise.

CiviCRM core features include:

Store information on Contacts—Individuals , Organizations, Households—and the relationships among them.
Store multiple Locations (phone, address, etc.) for each contact record.
Internationalization. Support CRM information for multiple countries.
Support custom, user-defined fields for each contact record.
Support arbitrary, user-defined groups of contacts.
Versioning and rollback for all data.
Contact level view/edit permissions.

CiviCRM v1.0 will implement core functionality within the Drupal framework, enabling CivicSpace integration. CivicRM v1.1 will be a stand-alone product supporting both Drupal and other content management systems.