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.