Recomend some fund raising software.

June 17, 2009 12:22 PM

Looking for some good but inexpensive fund raising software for multiple political candidates. It will need to track donors, donations, print reports, and make life easier without a bazillion excel files.

I work in a political organization that runs four regular elected officials and picks up the odd school board or county legislator race every now and again. We do so many things well it astounds me that our fund raising information is crap. Only one candidate has an actual database and the rest are slapped together excel files from disclosure reports (GHA!).

I want to get them to use a single piece of software that can do the following

1) Keep track of all donors and each of their donations
2) Print mailing labels
3) Print call sheets
4) add tags to donors and donations (such as issues, or events)
5) Manage multiple candidates

Access can do this, but Access is not idiot proof and idiots have messed up previous access databases beyond use.

Right now all information is in excel and on my Mac. But reentering information in another format or for another OS is not a problem.

posted by munchingzombie to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Well, Raiser's Edge is pretty elegant and amazing, but ti won't meet your inexpensive requirement I'm guessing.
posted by Lutoslawski at 12:48 PM on June 17

I am guessing. I don't work for any fancy pants Senators or the like, mostly regional politicians in the country's third poorest city. So, shelling out between $500-$1,000 is about all I could squeeze out of them as one has a primary this year and the other three will doubtlessly have one next year as well.
posted by munchingzombie at 1:06 PM on June 17

CiviCRM

Open source, works with Drupal (and Joomla now, apparently).
posted by mkultra at 1:42 PM on June 17

CiviCRM was the product of teh Howard Dean campaign so it certainly meets many of these requirements. I'm not sure how much separation you need, but I'd certainly encourage you to give it a try. I use it on the web sites of a few non-profit organizations.

You run it on a web server, but you could set it up on a web server on the very same computer you are using it on if connectivity is an issue.
posted by advicepig at 6:53 PM on June 17

I am going to set up CiviCRM on my computer and give it a whirl. From the preview it looks like exactly what I needed. Thank you all.

If any of you are in Buffalo I'll let you in to one of our high end FR's on the house.
posted by munchingzombie at 4:31 PM on June 21

So, I am seeing and responding to this really late, but I have extensive political fundraising software experience. Memail if you are still in need of help.
posted by fyrebelley at 1:25 PM on October 26