Wednesday we had the first nonprofit operations brown bag lunch discussion here at the Tech Center—which I think went really well.

The topic that everyone wanted to talk about was nonprofits sending out mass e-mails to their clients, constituents or donors. 

John Kenyon [1] a technology consultant participated in the discussion and provided some helpful examples of affordable mass e-mail providers for nonprofits:

• Email Now [2]
• Constant Contact [3]
• Democracy in Action [4]
• Yahoo Groups [5]
• Google Groups [6]
• Vertical Response [7]
• Topica.com [8]
• CiviCRM/CivicSpace [9]
• NPO Groups [10]
  

We also discussed how sending out mass e-mails by your regular e-mail provider is not recommended. The general progression that nonprofits seem to follow is, first they use a free e-mail service first like Google groups, then progress to something that costs $15-$20 a month, like Email now or NPO Groups, and then if the nonprofit wants additional features like a database then they choose something like CiviCRM or Democracy in Action.

The discussion also turned out to be a little bit about websites and Content Management Systems (CMS) which are databases used to manage and store web content.  We discussed some examples of open source tools like Drupal [11], Plone [12], Joomla [13], and Mambo [14] that allows nonprofits to easily manage and update their content online. Granted, nonprofits would need a web savvy person to set up their site, but once the site is set up, anyone (the organization designates) can update the content on the site. Aspiration currently has a Drupal website site, and being the accidental techie that I am, I like how easily I can post materials to the website!