Samenfeld Consulting

Nonprofit Starter Kit

Everything a nonprofit needs to get up and running on the web.

Organizations of all sizes have similar needs.  They all need a web presence that allows them to tell their organizations story, manage events through calendaring and event registration, communicate with their constituents through mailing list and eNewsletter management, provide directories of their members, manage their membership, take on-line donations, and post their job and volunteer opportunities.  In addition, many organizations want to provide a place for collaboration with tools like document sharing and on-line discussion forums.

The idea behind the Nonprofit Starter Kit is to provide a basic set of tools and a set of additional modular options for building on that foundation to serve all of the basic and advanced organizational needs in the most cost-effective way possible.

After working with all of the big proprietary tools like Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise as well as having worked with all of the major open source content management systems (CMS) like Plone, Drupal and Joomla, I found that Joomla provided the best value and greatest opportunity to create a framework that can provide all of the functionality organizations require at a fraction of the cost of implementing in the other competing platforms.

I've worked with Joomla and its predecessor Mambo for the past 4 years.  I've distilled my experience with Joomla and its modular components into a core set of elements that combine to provide all the basics in a Starter Kit that can be installed and confirured quickly.  The Starter Kit includes training for your internal IT staff person to ensure that you can fully leverage the power of the web harness it to support your organizations needs and mission.

Additional components like CiviCRM can extend your organization's ability to provide custom database driven applications to meet even the most data intensive of requirements.

By understanding what the cost drivers are of this kind of project, I have created a drop-in solution that can be reliably delivered at a fixed cost.  This allows organizations with limited budgets to get their site up and running and to begin to use it to generate new revenues through on-line donations and membership fees.  Increased revenues can then fund the addition of advanced compoents and for refinements like custom templates to enhance the look and feel.

Take a look at the stories of the organizations that have used this Starter Kit to jump start their organizations and increase their organizations effectiveness and capacity.