Michelle Murrain, NOSI
Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) tools are one of the bread and butter tools of nonprofit organizations: tracking donations, constituents, activities and the like are critical to accomplishing mission. It makes sense then, that CRM and fundraising software are the most plentiful and mature software product vertical in the nonprofit sector.
There is also an increasing amount of change and innovation in this realm, from open APIs on such stalwarts as Convio and Kintera, to newer open source alternatives like CiviCRM and MPower Open, and the entry of Salesforce.com as a force to be reckoned with.
This is, for sure, a space to watch.
The question is, how do the newer open source alternatives stack up to the long standing proprietary packages and Software as a Service (SaaS) options that people have gotten used to? The answer is, for the most part, they stack up quite well. There is likely to be an open source package that will work for your organization.
On the small-scale side, Organizer's Database is an open source desktop database (although it depends on Windows and Visual Basic), and is a great choice for small organizations that want a simple but powerful CRM, without having to pay to acquire it. It compares well to the myriad smaller desktop proprietary fundraising and CRM packages that have been out there for a while, such as Giftworks.
In the web-based realm, SugarCRM and CiviCRM are two server-based web applications. They are free and open source, and install fairly easily on a Linux server, or even generic virtual hosting service.
SugarCRM is designed for business, so like Salesforce.com, you have to re-arrange your thinking about how to use them, and translate vocabulary (like “accounts” should be “organizations”.) There are, however, quite a number of nonprofits that use it.
CiviCRM, on the other hand, is designed for nonprofit organizations, and has very nonprofit specific functions, like tracking contributions, membership and event registration. The new version has some case management functionality. It also scored quite high on the NTEN CRM satisfaction survey conducted late last year -- in fact, it was first in satisfaction. There is an increasingly active community, it is under heavy development, and some large and well known nonprofits are using it.
SugarCRM and CiviCRM can be compared most clearly to web-based CRMs like eTapestry, CitySoft, Kintera, or Convio, although there are not exact feature overlaps, so it's not easy to make a direct comparison.
The new player in the field is MPower Open, which was called “MPX” but is newly open source. MPower Open is an enterprise-class client/server CRM that compares very well feature-wise with Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge. It is a good thing that there is now an open source client/server package that can compare well with what is sometimes considered the standard.
What is important to remember, of course, is that although all of these CRM examples are “free”, they are not without cost to implement. Some, such as Organizer's Database, and even SugarCRM, can be up and running in a matter of minutes, but of course it will take days and weeks of time and effort before any CRM, whether open source or proprietary, bears fruit. CiviCRM and MPower Open are alternatives that take a bit of expertise to implement, and it will be important to find people who can provide training and support for those packages in order to take the best advantage of them.
Open Source CRMs are getting better, more plentiful, and providing options to nonprofit organizations that can be more cost-effective, and more flexible than the proprietary alternatives. This, as well as the fast growing open source field in general, is providing competition and incentives to change (like MPower becoming open source) that can only benefit everyone in the long term.