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

[Esther L via TriLUG]

Jos -

I would have recommended NCTech4Good (which moved from meetup to
techsoup.org) but it looks like that group may have disbanded. It looks
like the nearest techsoup chapter is
https://events.techsoup.org/techsoup-connect-washington-dc-chapter/ .
TechSoup seems to have access to a lot of discount programs, haven't looked
enough to see if they have access to free hosting or software.

I implemented Wild Apricot for a nonprofit when I was a board member a few
years ago. It's owned by Personify now. I don't know if there is still a
free version, but 600 rows of data would be outside their free version.

Good luck!
Esther Lumsdon


On Fri, Dec 16, 2022 at 12:50 AM Jos Purvis via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org>
wrote:

> 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. :)
> --
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-- 
----
Esther L, estherlist at gmail.com
"It happens that creeping requirements tend to contain more bugs than
original requirements. Testing defect removal efficiency is also lower
against creeping requirements." Capers Jones