Re: ANN: Calendula --fundraising for nonprofits and schools
On Thursday 31 July 2003 08:16 pm, Darryl Caldwell wrote:
> One of the most important pieces of software at work in most nonprofit
> organizations is the fundraising management system. This was true even
> before the current economic climate, it is an imperative now.
> Fundraising management systems in the form of specialized databases help
> NPOs track their donors, prospective donors, and help manage their
> events.
> * We hope to make a system that can be generalized. While we want to
> address fundraising needs first and foremost, we also want to build
> an infrastructure that can be used for other application that deal
> with the human contacts a foundation makes: action centers,
> political organizing, conference planning, general contact management.
The things you describe are all features I intend to add to the existing
project, InfoCentral, of which I am now the lead developer. Perhaps we can
coordinate our efforts to avoid duplicating the same work.
Right now, InfoCentral is a primarily a membership information database,
though I recently added some basic donation tracking support. (btw, despite
what the homepage says, it is not really church-specific..) InfoCentral is
written in PHP, though unfortunately it has no database-backend abstraction
at this time. (designed around MySQL) In the near future I intend to begin a
re-work of the internals using proper three-tier design and with an XML-based
application server. Eventually, what now exists will only be the web-client.
From what I can tell from your preliminary database schema in
calendula-pg.sql, you are aiming largely for functionality that is already
implemented in InfoCentral. (in fact, several of the tables we use are
nearly identical) I would encourage you to take a look at what we've got so
far and see if you think it would make sense to syncronize efforts. I would
certainly be flexible in changing the database schema of InfoCentral to match
our mutual needs if we decided to do so. I personally think a couple of your
ideas are better than what we currently have implemented (specifically the
seperate address and phone tables..)
Let me know what you think..
Chris Gebhardt
---
http://www.openserve.org
http://www.infocentral.org
Reply to: