Eric Leland, Five Paths, Laura Quinn, Idealware, Chris Bernard, italics media

Donors are the lifeblood of nonprofit organizations. You need them to survive. But how do you manage all the information about their giving along with all the personal details that are key to maintaining successful relationships, all for a price that won’t break your bank?

A donor management system is sometimes called a fundraising system or a donor database. At its most basic level, it’s a system that manages information about donors and gifts so you can understand how much you’ve raised, keep track of all the useful information you know about your donors, manage mailings, emails and campaigns, and print reports on all this information.

There are a huge number of systems available, ranging from the basic to those that offer all sorts of additional features and functionality. Costs vary as well -- and there are even some Free and Open Source options. In our free report, "A Consumers Guide to Low Cost Donor Management Systems", we take a look specifically at 33 lower cost systems, but here, let's take a quick look at four of the FOSS options.

If there's one thing I've learned in my 6+ years at NTEN, it's that people love to hate their web sites. Perhaps that's why there are so many choices when it comes to CMS (oodles of which are rated in our CMS satisfaction survey). Ask anyone in the nonprofit technology community about Content Management Systems, and they're likely to mention one of the following:

• Drupal
• Joomla
• Plone

We like them because they're free. We love to hate them because there are so many twiddly bits to adjust. Thank goodness we have Laura Quinn, Executive Director at Idealware. She's going to sort out some of the differences between the three and make sense of it all, in terms even non-geeks can understand.

I spoke with her about her session at the 2009 NTC, "Comparing Open Source CMSs: Joomla, Drupal, and Plone", and why CMS seems to be the area where open source has really taken off in the sector:

These days, it seems like everyone's talking about open source content management systems. These packages -- like Joomla, Drupal, and Plone -- can be a great way to go, but they're far from your only options.

For many nonprofits, strong features in areas such as online donations, event registration, and email newsletters are as important as the website itself -- and integration between these components can be a big issue.

If this is the case for your organization, consider a hosted, integrated platform.