Re: Calendula diagram
On Tuesday 02 March 2004 8:21 pm, Darryl Caldwell wrote:
> Hi Debian-NPers,
Hey Darryl,
> I have whipped up a diagram of the Calendula Fundraising system interface
> work flow. It is a bit crude, as I have no formal training in this type of
> diagramming. Any comments are welcome.
>
> It has been said that fundraising systems are the killer app for nonprofit
> adoption of FLOSS.
>
> http://fudosys.com/calendula-diagram.png
>From my experience with non profits (mainly small ones), their (fundraising)
mailing list is pretty core to their operations and any change to
how they maintain it is invasive and high risk and must show a high return. In
at least two cases I have seen first hand, the list had been set up by
someone who subsequently left, and the users were extremely risk-averse about
changing anything. ;)
>From this perspective, one piece that is missing from your work flow is an
import action.
Another possibility is to consider making Calendula wrap around an existing
mailing list database, so the user doesn't have to change anything. Define a
plugin interface that Calendula calls to get address details--you just store
the fundraising stuff. Then write one implementation of the interface for an
ODBC connection (or an Outlook address book, or Act, or Organizers DB, or
FileMake pro, or ??) Maybe you could use a similar concept on the output side
(mail merge and mailing labels). Do you really want to be writing mail merge
stuff?
Regards,
Mark
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