The following email arrived today from Peter Davis of fuzion.co.nz. It may be of interest to community organisations.

We know that many NGOs and community groups are not benefiting from some of the integrated online features that can make managing an organisations contacts more straightforward.

Features such as enabling people to register direct for events without having to reply to e-mails or logging in to websites; renewing directly from a link in an email, without risking creating duplicate contacts etc.

Therefore, I wanted to let you know about an application to the Digital Strategy Community Partnership Fund which would provide funding to help more users in the not-for-profit sector to take advantage of an open source contact management tool — civiCRM.

The first round of documentation has to be delivered on November 10th 2008 and while this timeframe is now incredibly tight there is always the option of organisations becoming involved further down the track.

The funding application is being made to help enable the non-profit sector to benefit from a fully-feature, flexible, open source ‘contact’ management tool. The funding would subside data migration, training, implementation and support for those NGOs that choose to be a part of the project.

Being open source means civiCRM has no licensing costs or support obligations, and there is a strong community of developers adding new features.

We have implemented civiCRM for both simple and highly complex organisations in New Zealand and know that it is a robust and capable system.

We are very keen to help other NGOs know of its existence and enjoy the benefits of having a product that can effectively manage their

• membership
• fundraising
• contact management
• internal organisational systems
• events
• bulk emailing and much more.

I would of course be very happy to show you what civiCRM is capable of, should your organisation be keen to learn more, regardless of the outcome of this funding proposal.

However, at present we are particularly keen to get some ‘letters of support’ from the non-profit sector so that we may get funding to assist with several aspects

• develop a series of resources to facilitate adoption of CiviCRM by other non-profit and community user groups
• encourage the expansion of the community of CiviCRM users in New Zealand, with a view to benefit from economies of scale
• run a series of CiviCRM Workshop Series that would cover implementation, system manager training, data migration, user training
• ensure there are affordable CiviCRM Shared Hosting & Installation Services.

We are also hoping we will be able to develop a community of learning of CiviCRM users in the New Zealand non-profit sector, to ensure continued sharing of knowledge and best practices.

An additional outcome would be to set up the first annual New Zealand CiviCRM User Group Meeting, to provide an opportunity for mutual learning and sharing of experiences and successes.

To help support the application we are looking to get letters of interest from within the non-profit sector.

Please contact Peter (peter.davis [@] fuzion.co.nz if you want to discuss providing such a letter.

Read more about civiCRM at www.civicrm.org.

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TechSoup has come to New Zealand, bringing donations of software for community organisations:

TechSoup New Zealand provides donated software and hardware from companies such as Microsoft to eligible New Zealand Charities, Voluntary and Community Groups registered as a charitable organisation under the New Zealand Income Tax Act 2004.

If you’re still persevering with costly proprietary software — programs such as Microsoft Word — this could be very useful for your organisation.

There’s not a lot there for Mac users at the moment: 2 programs. Virtual PC which is of use only to people using older Macs that don’t have an Intel processor, and Powerpoint for those who don’t use Apple’s own Keynote.

Windows users have more than 100 programs listed.

Linux users are likely to use Open Source software anyway.

… New Zealand organisations have already begun to register and receive software donations.

There are minimum product and ordering frequency requirements for eligible organisations with charitable status. So it is important you register now and then think about what your software requirements may be over the coming year.

The software itself is donated free of charge, but there is an administration fee of only 4% of the retail value of the product. This amounts to a mere $13+GST per copy of Windows Vista (Business version), only $27+GST for Office Professional Plus 2007 and $89+GST for Windows Small Business Server 2003 Premium Edition.

[Via : CommunityNet Aotearoa.]

There are, of course, plenty of other options — we often write about them here. For many purposes you can replace Word, Excel and Powerpoint with Google Docs or Open Office, and Mac users have an excellent suite of Apple software in Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

There’s loads of Open Source software available to handle almost everything you can imagine doing with a computer, and many online web applications take the emphasis off storing and using information on isolated computers and allow greater collaboration. For example, Basecamp is an excellent online collaboration tool.

Explore Techsoup and see what it can offer. There may be something there that can save your organisation hundreds of dollars, freeing up funds for more exciting online initiatives.

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