In this conversation I assume we are dealing with nonprofits that are ACTUALLY small; i.e. to small to have an executive director.

Here's a goofy idea. Quickbooks. You already have it for doing your accounting, but my guess is you wildly underuse its numerous features. It includes a database for "customers" which you don't use for anything at all - right? Use it for members.

I assume you already have Quickbooks because it's $45 at TechSoup. Make sure you buy the Windows version. The Mac version is a crippled toy which does not support nonprofits.


Yes, and I've seen the same with donor management systems. They are stuck in lower Manhattan. Look at Salesforce, at 1 Market, San Francisco, their heads in the fog. They come down from their ivory tower for a $15 burger and fries at Pearl’s or Gott’s, $79 outfield seats at the ballpark, $90 for a cheapie membership at SFMOMA. They absolutely cannot relate to, and do not want, a small museum in flyover country who grosses $70,000 a year and has $20 memberships.

Just look at any of these companies' "buy it now" page. They want to ask you 20 questions and put you in a sales funnel. That kind of personalized attention means they expect you to spend at least $1000/year with them.


Plus they can auto-renew.

But not if they can join and vote!!!! I can’t help thinking of the 2009 takeover attempt of SMRS. They struggled to find a way to surprise us with the pile of memberships at the last minute. They delivered them on a Friday because they couldn’t chance the membership manager being away from home on Monday, and that 3 days of notice saved our bacon. Online they could have simply entered them all starting at about 8pm the night of the deadline. There needs to be friction or a safety valve.


I design complex systems for a living. As thrilling as it may be to “homebrew” a solution using Python, Access or MySQL running in local-mode on your Mac (any of which I can do in my sleep), fact is: Elvis. You go away, the organization is in the lurch. Yes a few other volunteers COULD figure it out by studying your docs, but that will never happen. Capische? They’ll just declare the data lost and blame you.

A basic litmus test is: If you send the raw files to all your Board members, half of them should be able to recognize it in 2 minutes and decode it usefully in an hour. All your key data needs to be “easy like that”.

And that is more important than being fancy.

That said, you can fancy up a unitized task. When I do a customer mailing, I use custom Perl code to slice and dice the list into small batches and avoid double mailing. Nobody could replicate that but they don't need to. Next mailing, someone else will do it another way.

“easy like that” means data needs to be in a format everybody can read: in practical terms that boils down to Excel, a gold-standard "everybody uses it" for at like Quickbooks, or a cloud service which comes with its own user interface.


Oh heck yes!

Google has one other product that is useful but underdeveloped, called “Google Fusion Tables”. It’s such a simple database that it’s practically a spreadsheet. But it is designed to work with an API, so you could build “apps” to manipulate it. It passes the “easy like that” test because the database proper is dog simple and easy to use via the default UI. And if you want more laborsaving complexity, you can “graft it on top” via the API. Best of both worlds.


Well the underlying technology is more than capable of handling a million volunteers, so those limits are artificial. The vendor will raise it to anything you want if you pay them a pile of extra money. They will literally change two bytes in the software enabling a higher maximum. Bastards.

Neato! I haven't heard of this, but will check it out.