[TriLUG] Fwd: Non-profit Contacts: Migrating away from FileMaker

[Jos Purvis via TriLUG]

Hi folks,

Figured someone on this mailer would have some good ideas for this. I volunteer with a local non-profit theatre company that's busy working on fixing up their IT stuff, all of which has been volunteer-managed and very catch-as-catch-can over the last decade-plus.

Right now, they have an enormous FileMaker database that contains 6000+ rows worth of contact information, plus at least two other spreadsheet/database-type stores of similar information. I'd like to figure out a way to consolidate all of this into something useful (as right now it's very siloed with lots of duplication), and preferably move it into something open-source and maintainable.

Couple constraints I'm working under:
    * The group is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit, so they get free/reduced-price access to a lot of things like Google Workspace, Microsoft apps, etc. However, the budget for this is approximately "HAHAHAHAno", so I have to find a way to construct something that doesn't involve paying for more infra.
    * The folks who will be maintaining content going forward aren't DBAs or technical-types, for the most part. To set context, if this all lived on one machine I'd consider putting this into an Access database and putting some forms in front of it for doing data management.

My first thought was an open-source CRM like CiviCRM[0], but I've not worked with one before. I'm game to try, but had read worrisome comments that indicated they were more like setting up SAP[1] than setting up Wordpress.

My other thought was to see if there was a no-code/low-code solution like Airtable that might be able to put some nice forms in front of 7,000+ records worth of info. Part of the dataset is in a MySQL database, but then we'd have to find something to put in front of it to provide gentle data management/searching...

Any ideas, comments, thoughts, shouts of horror, expressions of sympathy, or suggestions for therapy would be appreciated!

Cheers,

Jos

[0] And in fact they're already using Wordpress for some website management bits...
[1] Easy to do wrong, hard to do right, nearly impossible to fix later, and mostly a vehicle for large consulting contracts. :)