Discover Open Source Rfp Management Software for Nonprofit Organizations

Open source rfp management software for Nonprofit

and organization and working with speakers and word camps and I always tell them to look for presentations their stories that people tell them what they've done what's happened so I said all right i'll do that i'll make a presentation i'll tell the story so we're going to try that a couple of disclaimers i'll talk about myself i normally don't do this i'm going to tell the story don't always do that so we're going to work through this together right so i'll put the slides up afterwards so one thing I wanted to check this is the higher ed track and I'm talking mostly about nonprofits just for a short hands how many people here are higher ed specific related that are in the room okay nonprofit okay great all right so we will start talking about me so my journey with nonprofits started back in nineteen eighty-three working for a university hospital finance accounting boring stuff but what's interesting is once you get in working with a non-profit you understand their way you understand what they do and pretty much you become ingrained in that world or at least I did I then work through that many jobs in in 2004 I did two things I started started a non-profit and boy that's a different experience and i also changed my business where i started consulting to nonprofits the twist on this is that there's no wordpress related function at this point because back then all of the systems that I were using was proprietary it was accounting systems finance project management you know Microsoft Certified this in Microsoft that so it was a very different experience from what the open source world is so the next step for me was 2006 i discovered wordpress or may be able to discovered foreman so also how did I get involved in WordPress and open swamp source software basically my wife she started her own websites and she needed help and I did computer systems and the like so I got pulled in that way and it was really interesting and I got bitten by the WordPress bug and we started developing WordPress sites started working on them and in 2012 we had I gotten to the point where now we were creating WordPress sites for nonprofits and I was kind of back to where I started and working with the people in the organizations that I was comfortable with the eyelines working with so with working with nonprofits you know creating a website you know WordPress you know when I started with it an even in 2012 it was at that point transitioning to being caught up more as a CMS as opposed to a blogging platform you know we were actually pushing the envelope people wanted the blog they wanted the wordpress site but they wanted a lot of functionality so the first thing we always heard from these organizations is we want contributions okay need the money how else are we going to run we need memberships that's first and foremost I need to that we're going to run events because the events are the fundraisers we are going to need mailings they're going to send bulk mail you know to all their constituents or to their contacts transactional the receipt for that event to remind you that that event is going to happen petitions advocacy we had started working with nonprofits that were doing a lot of I'll say lobbying I can't think of a better word but they were really on a social cause trying to get people to write to their congressmen to support funding of the RSS the first one that comes to mind so we needed that and they needed reports they needed reports on all of this because how else could you see what your effect was if I didn't have a report and lastly they wanted it all integrated they wanted to look up a contact director for one of their you know members and see everything they had done all the activities that that contacted done at the time technically dawned on us this is I'm bad about talking about myself us and the we that I'm referring to is tengo collective that's the word press agency that I'm a part of and so that's the week because we're the ones that develop these sites we really were starting to realize that we were asking for was not just a bunch of plugins but a CRM and we went to build this with WordPress because that's what we knew and loved and we started out with plugins we started out with event plugins membership plugins and it was a real interesting thing when we put together a site and had I think the first thing we thought we had right had about 72 different plugins to give the organization what they want but yet it didn't okay it just didn't have the functionality didn't have the cohesive this so we had a bit of a problem one of our collective members was working with a project called City crm and stiffy CRM is a add on to WordPress I won't call it a plugin but it was originally developed for drupal as a module in 2005 joomla support was added next and in 2012 they released a wordpress on bridge if you will so now there was a wordpress plugin will call it a plugin cuz though it's really bigger than wordpress in many ways so we decided to look into this so if one should we use city crm should we now throw out the 72 plugins and try to work with this one system so why did we want to work with city crm well a number of reasons which i listed up there yes my powerpoints hold on i have a fancy one that's not me but it's really you know what are we what are the clients what are our nonprofits one they want to own and control their own debt they want to make sure that they have it that it's not some proprietary data store that they're paying for or that they have to let's talk looking for it I have to worry about getting the data out later open source okay honestly our clients word is concerned about that as we were but we wanted an open source GPL solution because that's just where we think the biggest strength is and i'll talk more about that a little bit we wanted a strong community by 2012 all of us had been members of the WordPress community and understood the power of the community in building a strong profit from project okay and maybe profit and we wanted something that shared values with WordPress and as we delve into city CRM we thought we pretty much had it so City CRM is and that's City CRM org and when I post the slides I'll make sure I put the links in the slides I don't have them here yet city serum is an open source project GPL that has a really clear vision and just like WordPress democratizes publishing cindy crm is basically a CRM that will allow organizations to engage their contacts and own their own data and their code and modify and extend and that's really what drew us in and it was like so I need a CRM and what is a serum at heart you know for us to contact you know constituent relationship management system all that's going to do is it's going to stitch the parts together that I mentioned before it's going to allow an organization to take contributions memberships events grants I'll go on in a couple of slides but it's a single database a single place for them to store this and then be able to use that going forward city does this in a modular based method and what we liked about that that we did not have to turn on all the modules it has contributions it has pledges it has memberships of events mass communications both SMS messaging and email and campaigns so that we can tie these together in further has added case management so that you can actually you know there are nonprofits managing you know like social services managing cases all through cities erm volunteer management has been added where we can now assign and track volunteers not only for events but for fundraisers there's a grant module if you are grant recipient or if you are grand giver you can actually track your grants full accounting functionality we can actually tab every transaction in the system with accounting codes so it can be exported and pulled into your accounting system and reporting reporting module at the heart is one of the strongest things that that is there so this seemed to fit our need so we said okay let's really dig into this we also looked at I wanted to put up here coqueta the usage by sector and I got this information right from the city serum court team this goes back to April and the largest sector still is education now that's not education as in higher ed universities using this although some do it's more education nonprofits as a classification of the nonprofit if you have an educational mission you fall into this bucket and who is using the software fit in with what we wanted to do so this was perfect right yeah everything we asked for no exactly so when we're back in because we did in late 2012 early 2013 you know we were on the initial WordPress integration and that initial WordPress integration was sponsored by University and Scotland who needed and did research and decided they needed city CRM but they didn't want or need Drupal or Joomla so they paid to have the city CRM made compatible with WordPress very interesting they launched and they're not using it anymore because the person in charge move but they helped fund this so when we got into it there were a lot of features that were not fully developed for WordPress because there have been six to seven years worth of development working with Drupal and we couldn't compete on that we couldn't have all the functionality wanted so really it was how do we fix this what do we do what are we as a group dude we abandon message we move on well we were WordPress people we had met doing meetups in New York and work camps in New York so we knew what the answer is going to be we contribute exactly so basically the answer here is what can we do to fix this how can we get it done or we're going to contribute so as we started working on it we came to the realization that there were very few WordPress people working on steady CRM when we went to their conferences and when we went to their they don't have contributor days they have cody's fruits we went there we were yet ok there were other people because there were other installs and I didn't bring the slide because I couldn't get get it to work properly but back in 2012 wordpress had about two percent of all installs of City CRM ok drupal was somewhere in the 85 to 90 percent range so of course there were so many so many fewer of us but we needed the improvements so what we decided was will start creating issues will start asking for the functionality and wherever possible starting to build it itself so now it's a question of you know what can we get done we're up small agency in the new york city area there's four of us working with nonprofits with relatively small budgets so our pockets are not so deep how we get this done and I'm no expert coder ok my background is an accounting and finance I've inherited this and learned as I've done so we'll create issues community is a great thing we're going to get in there and they're going to help us Robin a pitch in and work together so the first issue that i had was on a payment processor you know we want the in contribution so we want people to pattern there was an odd issue where if there were any zeros in the contribution after the decimal point it was being stripped out so if somehow you calculated that was a hundred dollars in nine cents it's 100 hours okay it was one hundred dollars and 57 cents with a hundred dollars and 57 cents weird bug there was an issue for it we commented so I basically start off by saying hey let me go through my settings let's try to fix this oh by the way my CMS is WordPress and this is happening maybe there's a bigger problem maybe they were never there at all and I got my first response back in this community and I whited out the person because this has changed years later there's your problem wordpress so at this point we really knew that we were pretty much alone and we had to do two things we had to change the color to make it better we had to change minds and I see someone nodding right there and the latter is so much more difficult so what how did I react to this what was I going to do well anyone who knows me knows my initial reaction was probably loud not repeatable and quite animated and I'm sure it was especially as I still talk about this to this day but we talked about it and our solution was I Drupal and Joomla I learned cindy crm on all three CMS's and I started testing on all three one of the things that attracted me to city was it worked on three different CMS's it was a true open source solution and it would be accessible to many many people you didn't have to WordPress if you had gerbil you could use it you could use it with joomla so the opportunity here of having a project an open source project that spanned to me the three major CMS is open source was real attractive so this is what we're going to do we're going to get involved and we had a result and what ended up happening was we were able to bring more WordPress people into the project the leads the people running City serum sore the power of this now that's not you know dilute let's not think we did everything they took a look at WordPress in in 2013 what was it only twenty-two percent of the web at that point it was still such a large base that they were like yeah we need to get this going so we had support the community as a whole became more open and started doing less single CMS development and more what we call CMS agnostic so that all the code works with all three CMS's and we've now seen an increased use of cities here on with WordPress I ran the stats or I asked them to run me the stats Thursday yesterday WordPress is now to twenty one percent of the installs for City Sierra Drupal is still the king of the hill and joomla is dropped which all makes sense and WordPress is growing every month so this is great we're making progress we're still doing the color so as I put on the bullet point April 2015 rolls around by now our firm is it established itself as a contributor to city CRM we're known and they have an annual conference each year and that year was in debt learn a big code spread and we go there and their coats prints are different than our contributor days they take all the contributors and we went to Rocky Mountain National Park put us in three cabins we were going to live there for a week cook for ourselves do everything and contribute code it's like a week in the woods I didn't eat oh yeah why buy everything ok so the lead developer comes up to myself and to other people a joomla person in a drupal and says ok here's your task for the week you're going to rewrite the installer excuse me who me okay well because there was a real problem especially with the wordpress so and I'm trying not to dive into a demo because then i'll keep you forever in the wordpress it you'd the plugin you click activate and then you come to a settings page where you confirm everything was right and then it would what it needed to run this plugin except this is what it looked like when you did it tons of red okay it was we can't the software your database credentials are wrong you cannot write to this folder where we're going to put the user files we have to write to the plug-in file so from our perspective meaning mine was doing everything wrong and this was our goal was to fix it and we sat down and we got support and now with the current version it now goes like that because we've now been able to rebuild the installer and a lot more because this turned into a project here we actually as I mentioned this was built for a single use with a Scottish University a lot of things were hard coded and that's all gone now we're now we'll be using native WordPress functions now when you get this installer as long as you're on a typical and good WordPress house it's all green and you can continue so that was a big wait for us because now people can actually download the software it and it will work so that really showed us that this project was very serious about getting to work with all three CMS's and supporting ourselves so to me that was pretty much you know validation of all the time spent everything done so this is where I was thinking of a demo but I'm not so one of the things that I mentioned was that one of the things that are nonprofit clients had always been asking for is what they call a contact dashboard place to see all activity for a particular contact what they've done and just to illustrate let's see how good that is how well you can see that but we are able that when you record all your activities in city it will give you a dashboard that interview user or the admin can say that says what groups are you in what contributions have you made have you made a pledge if there are soft credits meaning husband why partners you know organization making a matching donation on behalf of an employee all those soft credits get recorded as well what events have we gone to ok what memberships do you have yes in my test system is only monks I gave myself a lifetime membership ok relationships because what city does is it allows us to record relationships whether that is parent-child employee employer partners of business partner or life partner personal campaign pages i've created a personal campaign thing because that functionalities baked in here and grants as we use this particular system for testing the grant functionality so this actually melz everything together and you know i can afterwards we can talk down at the happiness bar i think is what's been instructed if you have specific questions about this but this now at this point has gotten to a very usable solution it's been that way probably since about 2015 but we've taken it to the next step so one of the other things that we wanted to just briefly talk about is alternative CRS because there's a lot out there and the ones we come in competition with enough going to pop up a list these are the ones that we hear about by no means is this a comprehensive list the best list the worst was or anything but nation builder is when we see all the time and CRM and a CMS salsa is more of a CRM and big in the political sector a lot of the people we deal with down in pc news that blackboard for nonprofits including their etapestry acquisition we hear that all the time sugarcrm and salesforce for nonprofit all the time we know this because when we get people moving the city serum these are the systems we have to take them from and the reason that we believe in city crm is that you're never trapped because a lot of the clients to come to us feel trapped by the pay as you grow fees with nation builder that's right we're going to reward you the more successful you are the bigger we're going to charge you to use our system salsa same thing the more you use there was a price increase a company years ago that was great for us because i think it was up they at least doubled their prices right now you could be in spending upwards of thirty five hundred a month to use salsa and for small and medium-sized nonprofits it's not going to happen and then the cost to get your data out of these systems is exorbitant salesforce for nonprofits i don't have a screen shot cuz their price is really hitting because they say sales nonprofits is free until you get limits yes maybe you you hit that okay and now it starts costing you and we even on that we even have a partner organization we work with out of Brooklyn New York they have scripts to pull the data out of the Salesforce and get it into well technically any crm with if we obviously are looking at the city so that is why we believe in the city Sierra so from this journey and what lessons have we learned and what I guess message or what do I think is the right thing for nonprofits to do and I our opinion my opinions on the only one end is that we want to have everyone on open-source soft we get to see the code we get to review the code you can modify the code word press has a plug-in systems if you have something that you need to do with WordPress you can build a plug-in to do that city serum has an extension system it's just a plug-in it's just their word so now we're going to extend city's functionality so in both cases I can change the actions of either system without modifying the core code and if you go to any developer talks they'll tell you that's a bad thing and we'll were able to do it we're also crowdsourcing so one of the plug-in wordpress plugins we use quite often with City serum and nonprofits is buddypress we integrate a few of the modules of buddypress here we have a buddy Press Group sink plug in that synchronizes buddypress groups with City CRM groups which we use for both you know security access control lists mailings etc and that plug-in was built by multiple organizations funding it the CUNY academic we participated our client nwu National Writers Union they actually participated so by crowdfunding this now this functionality is not just done for one organization it's out there for everyone and that's what we see is one of the greatest strengths of using a system like this because if you are on a proprietary system you use it their way and you know if you get it modified for you and I'm thinking more of the blackboard razor's edge world it's just for you so for us that's why we ended up using City crm the journey of how he got here was my story that I may or may not have told well I tried and the future is pretty bright because we are starting to really get feature parity with Drupal and I hope that we're actually going to be listing this in the plug-in directory soon okay there's a few hurdles there the plug-in team I think has one last question is this really a plugin because the system is enormous but the plug-in team for wordpress is very reasonable so I think we'll be able to work through that so that's what we've learned through this journey and I thank you very much for listening and do we have any questions so that last part are you saying that if we want to use this on a project right now it's not available or is no no pub it's um it's totally on github that's where we do all our development on City CRM gorg there's a download link and that's where you're going to download the code from it's just not in the WordPress plug-in house technical expertise and it's really difficult for them to do things like maintain and upgrade systems likes to be CRM so the promise of owning all of your own data and your own system actually turns into a nightmare when you don't have technical staff to actually maintain an upgrade a system like city so I'm curious what solutions do you have for that type of challenge so part of what we're doing there is the changes that we have now made in what's called version 4.7 of City CRM basically allows for it to be updated basic like any other wordpress plugin so in the old days you would have to go through a very manual update process now we can just update the plugin for our clients because we keep them on a maintenance plan and I update all of our clients to a single script and it takes me a few minutes there's very low overhead but yeah how to add a non-profit there's going to have to be somebody that knows how to update a plug-in so at this stage if you once the system is installed and configured if you can maintain a wordpress website and keep it in the plugins up today this can be kept up today I won't I don't want to sugarcoat it because you are now managing your own CRM you have to do your backups you have to do your data but if you if you don't have an in-house IT and you work with a good reputable WordPress / City Sarah agency or consultant they can get you set up so that you can then do that any other questions first of all Bravo for all the work in tender kisses what can you say about security so the two sides of that so security I'll talk first because of what I think of first is the code security so being an open source project on github with many eyes reviewing it it has very similar attributes that WordPress has to stay up to date there is a security team on City CRM just like there is WordPress that addresses any reported security vulnerabilities and patches them so that if we stay up to date that's means not as many people working on it but it's similar on the data security it depends on what you're storing in city to date I have not stored any data that would come under PCI compliance HIPAA compliance or any of the you know third Rams credit card data with the payment processors that are used is not stored in the database in the code anywhere there is personal information so you're going to have names and addresses and phone numbers the scrutiny that that gets under is of course less than what I would then any pci or HIPAA but it is something to watch for in that sense we do everything on you know everything risa the implementation we do is SSL we make sure that the servers and that the hosting plans they're on provide adequate backups that are securing possible as possible and we curate the plugins so that we are reducing the surface area it's a concern absolutely but it's in today's world it's it's not that different than another hosted solution but do you have to worry about those things there you are is someone pointed out you are now taking on that burden yourself or sharing that with your consultant does that ramble answer you okay one more break we have one not knowing anything about the city's your app ecosystem you said is open stores GPL how do they make money is it may be a model I mean where does that come into play that's a great question so the city serum is GPL it is free there is no cost to download so they have a court unlike WordPress where everyone is donated to the project and no one really owns that code base there's a team of five people that belong to the city serum organization to draw sour so how do they get paid their member users of city or encouraged to become a member organization of City CRM and make a donation they take donations for people just like a plug-in developer might take donations and they've been the recipients of grants from there and organizations the largest or the most well-known organization and I didn't put that slide in maybe i'll head before i post the new york state senate is the largest well-known city CRM user so if we're in massachusetts but if we were in New York anyone hear their data was sitting in a city database so they were a major funder at that point when they did the project and they do consulting work so that if I have a client asking for a big feature that's beyond my skills I can actually subcontract that out to the court team they'll build it and of course get paid for so that's how their funding well thank you very much I know