The Anam Cara House Geelong website went live earlier in the year, and now the Anam Cara House Colac site has gone live. The designs of the two sites vary somewhat to give a distinctive feel, however both sites use WordPress with a variety of plugins so that the administration and documentation is similar between both sites.

The site does not use WordPress widgets – a deliberate choice until such time as there is additional content on the site and the volunteers who will be updating the site become more familiar with the administration interface.

As with the Geelong site, one of the stumbling blocks was again the choice of Events Calendar. At first, the trusted EC was used, but it does not handle custom permalinks very well. I’ve settled instead on Events Calendar by Luke Howell, which is more basic but as is often the case, more reliable.

After many months of planning and collating content, the Anam Cara House Geelong website is now live. Many thanks to Diane Wright, Phil Virgona and Leah Hall for putting in several hours’ worth of content editing and testing

Anam Cara House is a Geelong based facility which provides respite services in a homelike environment to those suffering life limiting illness, and their families.

Check it out at

http://www.anamcarahousegeelong.org.au

As part of moving the technical maturity of both Anam Cara House Geelong and Bonnie Babes forward, I was investigating was free and / or open source software tools were available for volunteer and donor management. After a quick look around SourceForge and trying a couple of these out (eg iVolunteer), the best one available appears to be CiviCRM. This has a number of features including;

• integration with both Drupal and Joomla
• the ability to create groups within the contact database (for instance some donors are also volunteers, some volunteers are also members of the board of management)
• the ability to integrate online paymen with CiviCRM so that online donations are tracked
• event management – including the tracking of which contacts have participated or attended which events
• relationship tracking  – including recording relationships between contacts (such as mother, brother etc)

There is also a live online demo of CiviCRM that is very useful for providing organisations with an overview, or in depth exploration of functionality – suitable for requirements elicitation.

The software also seems to have a lot of support and a mature development team behind it – which augers well for future improvement of CiviCRM.