It’s late. I’ve been staring at the Plone Roadmap and the Collective for a while, just trying to get a picture in my head of where things are at, and where they are going. (It’s a lot of mostly good news.)
One of those things that’s just been rattling around for a while is the idea of a “Plone for NGOs” bundle that would package up Plone, set some sensible default settings, and throw in a selected handful of “best of breed” add-on Products that answer common nonprofit use-cases. A bunch of us nonprofit-sector Plone-a-holics have chatted about this, but I’ve not seen anything set into electrons. So here’s a first cut.
Disclaimer: really large nonprofits are likely to have “enterprise-scale” content management needs. No simple “NGO Plone bundle” is really going to address their needs. This proposal is about addressing the needs of small to medium-sized nonprofits.
I’m also writing this assuming that we already have the features that are planned for Plone 3.0 in mid-2007.
Finally, it seems like a lot of these products could be bundled, but disabled by default.
Without further ado, here’s my rough list of products I might think about including a “Plone For Nonprofits” bundle:
Quills – blogging
Press Room – for press releases, media clips. (Full disclosure: my colleagues at ONE/Northwest built this baby.)
Ploneboard – discussion forums
PloneFormGen – for general purpose form building – may make Signup Sheet somewhat redundant?
SignupSheet – great for simple free event signups
PloneSurvey – a nice general-purpose surveying tool.
eCampaigning – when it matures a bit more
SimpleCartItem – very simple e-commerce tool, dumps over to PayPal
CompositePack – for complex page layouts
PloneGoogleSitemaps – make Plone sites even more crawlable
AnalyticsForPlone – everyone should be using Google Analytics 
PloneTabs – make it easier to manage portal tabs
ATFlashMovie – probably not that useful for everyone, but really handle for thems that needs it.
RichTopic – Smart Folders with HTML intros. Makes them much more useful for building pages that list stuff.
PloneBookmarklets – encourage posting to social bookmarking services
PloneGlossary – define all those jargon words
CMFSin – or some other simple way to create simple RSS aggregations.
qRSS2Syndication – RSS 2.0 feeds (Plone only ships with RSS 1.0, which is useless for podcasting or other RSS enclosures)
ATAudio or Plone4Artists.Audio – basic podcasting
Some simple workspace tool suitable for a small “board” intranet – suggestions welcome.
Photo Gallery or Slideshow – product TBD. I kinda like Lightbox right now. But I’m open to suggestions.
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Ok, end of brain dump. What’s good, what’s bad, what’s missing?
Jon Stahl's Journal
Politics, the environment, technology, activism. And stuff.
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Jon,
A couple of the products I see as requirements for professional associations and NGOs are related to membership. We’ve either had to do CMFMember in the past, or membrane/remember custom types and workflows to accommodate the member sign-up and management process, as well as custom profile information handling. Teamspaces is also a common product we use with this.
We’re never going to have a custom member that’s part of this bundle that handles every organization’s needs, but it’d be good to have one that’s a bit more exhaustive than we have now. Maybe with 20 member attributes that are pretty common and to allow those who use this to just comment the attributes out that they don’t need. Or, to leverage ATSchemaEditor for the custom member type, perhaps.
I’m also starting to hear the need to integrate PayPal with the registration workflow. I think this is a fairly generic need for many NGOs and if any of us have such a workflow and/or custom member types already developed, we should include this as a separate product in the bundle. I’m not quite there with it just yet, but will let you know.
I’ve had a few NGO/association clients really like PloneArticle and PlonePoPoll as well. I think we should be able to add these pretty easily.
Recently, we’ve started using ArcheCSV to map the attributes of custom Archetypes-based types to the label row (column headers) of a CSV file and import data, generating real AT objects. I think this would be a very nice utility knife to make available in the bundle for NGOs. They may not use it if they don’t develop custom types, but many will need custom types and will need to migrate data from other systems.
We had a lot of discussion about various, targeted bundles at the conference. It’s good to see someone trying to keep the topic alive. Thanks!
Ken -
Thanks for the thoughtful commnets. PloneArticle and PlonePoPoll are both interesting products, worth considering.
ArcheCSV is definitely a useful utility, well worth considering, great suggestion.
On member types — my feeling on this is that Plone is about content management, not membership/CRM type stuff. I think the best bet for sophisticated use is always going to be to integrate with an outside CRM like Salesforce.com or what have you. That’s why I didn’t tackle membership issues in this brainstorm. But it’s definitely a big issue, worth thinking more about.
There is definitely a need for ecommerce tools that can do a good job with a simple donation workflow and a simple event payment workflow. A little more than SimpleCartItem, and less than “full-on” ecommerce.
Jon,
Exactly – since this bundle is being targeted at the smaller NGO or association, I was thinking a simple Paypal set of controller form pages rather than PloneMall type animal would be perfect. I realize it doesn’t seem anyone has shared anything that would be very off-the-shelf yet, though, to include in a bundle.
As for ‘real’ CRM integration such as that with Salesforce, I would think that would be beyond the scope of this bundle that’s aimed at smaller orgs; not that they couldn’t use something like that; but I find that most clients want to walk before they run, and want to manage some members by using Plone rather than using Excel, for example. So, that’s where I’m coming from on that.
A somewhat generically configured Salesforce-to-Plone PAS integration module could be bundled for the mid-to-enterprise size NGO bundle, then I’m all for it, of course. Anything that OneNW has done in this regard that would be generic enough to be useful to other org’s implementations would be great.
Hey Jon,
I was just kicking a similar list around with Aaron last week. Our lists track very very closely, of course.
The other items I was considering include:
Calendar X
LinguaPlone
Plone Comments
SmartPortlets
PloneGoogleMaps
A newsletter-lite tool like Plone Gazette or EasyNewsletter
PayPalDonation (we have started using that instead of any custom form-to-paypal content type just because it is so easy)
Great list!
Instead of CMFSin I recommend feedfeeder. It integrates nicely with sdotNews to setup a ‘News Hub’. A patch for RSS is currently in the feedfeeder issuetracker.
How about Wicked? Will this be shipping w/ 3.0?
It is really critical for there to be an easy to use, uncomplicated way for the organization to collaborate on authoring documents. The default plone workflow is simply too complex for the average non-technical user.
I think the bundle needs something wiki-like. No doubt about it.
/jsb
Jonah-
Wiki is definitely a must-have.
I didn’t include wicked because it is supposed to ship with Plone 3.0. Not sure if that’s actually going to happen, but I assumed it would.
I’m working on a membership/ID management solution based on solutions I have provided for some of my clients, including one intensive membership database solution with membership payment workflows (no integrated payment gateway yet though – maybe the next version)
http://sustainablesoftware.com.au/projects/ssidm/
Its based on membrane and is progressing well.
I also have an accounting framework on the go that I hope to link with the membership payment stuff. I’m just putting the finishing touches on an online shop for a client that uses the accounting framework as its basis.
Jon, just curious as to why you chose Quills over Coreblog2 or simpleblog? I have used both Quills and Coreblog and like them both. I was just curious if there was a reasoning behind Quills.
Rob,
Quills has more developers, an open SVN repository, is better tied into the mainstream of the Plone community and is moving much faster towards a Zope-3 style approach. That said, I’m not yet convinced its the “one true blog solution” for Plone — but it appears to be the strongest contender right now. Blogging and Plone is a challenging topic area, precisely because there are several contenders, but none that are truly 100% where we’d all like them to be.
Jon,
Great idea. You can also look into NGO-in-a-Box at http://ngoinabox.org/
I really admire this effort. Having worked with many non-profits and understanding their reliance on the staffer who happens to know only one technology or the volunteer who provides the low cost solution that ends up wasting resources … I believe that this venture has great merit. But I would push it in a slightly different direction. With a couple exceptions, I would suggest working on a list or document describing the needs and desires of non-profits and then finding the tools/products that fit them.
NGO’s main concerns are usually:
*internal operations
*fundraising
*member outreach
*general communications
*education of their constituency
*press/ media relations
*advocacy
At a general level these concerns can be reflected in technology by the following examples,
*almost all organizations would be served well by a web site that was integrated with an Intranet.
*Many organizations have four or so levels of site visitors who need access to different types and levels of information (site visitors, volunteers/supporters, paying members, staff).
*Most organizations have calendaring needs, newsletter and press operations.
*Well run organizations need well designed and integrated communications such as RSS, email, SMS, cell/phone/VOIP, postal, discussion boards/listservs, etc. These can be for one to one communications, instant alerts, phone trees, etc.
*Organizations often need fundraising tools that already exist and need to integrated with other aspects of the site/Intranet or need whole new ones that both bring in donations and help with reporting requirements.
*Advocacy organizations need tools that help them as an organization get information out to supporters, focus grassroots support on elected officials.
* Etc.
(one major requirement independent of an NGO’s general concerns, is that the site be easy to set up, administer and maintain. Plone is easy to administer and maintain. But Plone is more difficult than it should be for NGO’s to set up the web site in Plone (especially when using the look and feel of the old site). A fix to this would require one or two simple tools to allow the template (not Plone template, but the “look and feel” and design) to be applied in minutes with no Plone (TAL/METAL) experience needed.)
My feeling is concentrating first on the needs of the NGO’s will then drive the decisions on what products should be added (or created) and how to integrate them with the core data an NGO uses as well as outside tools that will continue to be used. An effort should be made to consolidate the core data as much as possible (member data for example).
Daniel-
My post didn’t mention it, because I’ve blogged about it a number of times before, but my thinking draws very heavily on the excellent research of my friend Leda Dederich at dotOrganize (http://www.dotorganize.net), which lays out NGO requirements. That said, Plone can’t possibly meet ALL of an NGO’s technology needs — it’s a CMS, not a miracle worker!
Jon,
Great start! I’ll have to investigate some of those tools!
A couple of things that we’re doing that seem like winners and frequent requests:
Staff / Board / Volunteer listing tool that you build with a form to populate those lists, including both a thumbnail and a larger picture. We haven’t productized this yet – but – we want to!
The cool “add a PDF file and have its contents indexed” feature.
Rotating image gallery where users just drop pictures (all the same size, mind you!) into a folder to populate that image gallery. Use some cool coding to sniff for Flash so it degrades nicely.
I’ll keep thinking – this is a really terrific start!
Patrick,
Get that stuff into the Collective my friend!
The staff/board/vounteer tool sounds particularly great. I can’t wait to see it!
Full-text indexing is excellent, but in the roadmap for Plone 3.0, so I didn’t list it here.
Salesforce for crm is so last year and non-opensource
Let’s see SugarCRM/PlonePAS integration!
Jon, this is an excellent bundle project, indeed.
By the way, one might consider other elements of the Plone4Artists bundle, including the calendar…
I can tell you’re undecided about Plone and blogs, as your blog is on wordpress
I posted a message to my blog about your idea:
http://yandleblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/organization-personas.html
(I hope you mind mind me linking to myself in this way.)
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