John Kenyon, Jennie Anderson, AIDS.gov, and William Neuheisel, DC Central Kitchen

Imagine producing online communications you're proud to share with the world and that garner praise from funders, donors, and other stakeholders.

Well, I am here to tell you that in general they are actually, um... pitiful. Dreadful. While there are exceptions, most have a lot of room for improvement.

And while social media and Web 2.0 are great, but if you don't have an effective website and email communications, you are largely wasting your effort trying to engage new audiences online.

Alison Cherry & Joanna Miles, Beaconfire

When it comes to nonprofit fundraising, everyone wants to know "the best" way to do things, but deceptively simple questions keep coming up. And the answer is usually the one we all fear (and hate): "It depends." It depends on your mission. It depends on your audience, and the design of your site, and the goal of your campaign.

There's only one way to know for sure what's best: test it for yourself.

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: