Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Donationware discussion

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Posted by Don Baccus on
You should get Talli involved, as he's spent a lot of time talking to organizations about this and knows quite a bit about Raiser's Edge.  A piece of software I hear more and more complaints about, BTW.

The ideas you post are a good start.

CC for starters, one-time charging only (don't want to implement automatic monthly giving via CC on a website, IMO, for security reasons - you'd have to keep the CC number around, which currently we don't do)

EFT stuff ... really useful long-term and it would be interesting if someone found out how it works.

Some of the very, very basic things non-profits will want:

1. by-donor tracking of donatations

2. tracking of donations by year and month

3. correlation of donations with particular fund-raising drives

4. a way for a donor to earmark a donation to a particular account - a particular fundraiser, or department, for small non-profits doesn't need to be fancy but this is needed by any medium-size non-profit and above.

5. bulk-loading of or remote db access to membership lists and the like, hooks to do so anyway.

This is just top-of-my-head stuff from having sat on the board of a non-profit, and being heavily involved in various aspects of fund-raising at times, for 15 years.