Community Group Website
February 5, 2011 5:03 PM   Subscribe

My community group needs a website and I've been given the job of setting it up. We need to sell tickets to events, keep track of membership dues/renewals, have some basic info pages, photos, etc. Right now we've working with Paypal, some spreadsheets, and a very out of date website (has a geocities era look to it). I have 20 hours to devote to this project, and have some very rusty coding experience. I know I can't build this myself. Are there ready to go solutions out there?
posted by Snower to Computers & Internet (10 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
Response by poster: Forgot to mention: we use Constant Contact to manage our mailing lists, and would like our registration form to continue to be integrated with that.
posted by Snower at 5:05 PM on February 5, 2011


you might want to look at meetup.com. You can charge for events (similar to selling tickets for events), charge members dues, create pretty lightweight about pages, use group forums, and upload photos to albums.

another option, but I don't know how you'd charge for events (not super familar with it) is groupspaces.com.
posted by lyra4 at 5:18 PM on February 5, 2011


Squarespace is a really easy way to put together good looking sites in not much time. I'm not sure if/how they integrate with payment and things like that, but they have a two-week trial for you to mess around with and see if it fits your needs.
posted by jjb at 5:41 PM on February 5, 2011


Use Meetup and/or EventBrite.

The setup I've seen some communities using is having a domain pointing to a well-designed landing page that basically links to the group's page on Meetup and have the billing and registration for individual events done by Eventbrite (I've used it to pay for tickets to tech-related meet-ups in NYC, and it works really well).
posted by falameufilho at 6:01 PM on February 5, 2011


Best answer: On 20 hours, I'm not sure you can get up to speed on CiviCRM, but it's a free (Open Source) and awesome non-profit focused package that does almost all of this. No Constant Contact integration that I know of, but it's very possible someone's written one. We use it for our volunteer management at the City of Lakes Loppet and love it.

The CRM parts plug into a larger Drupal or Joomla! install. Both are very capable content management systems.
posted by advicepig at 7:01 PM on February 5, 2011 [2 favorites]


BrownPaperTickets is great for ticketing.
posted by Miko at 8:35 PM on February 5, 2011


Response by poster: I guess it would be helpful to mention this is for a club with a membership of only 150, so some of these larger ticketing solutions aren't right for us. Most of our events have 20-75 members attending, and they aren't open to the public.
posted by Snower at 5:27 AM on February 6, 2011


WordPress! There's plenty of CMS solutions out there. I don't know anything about CiviCRM, but WordPress works for most everyone. If you're looking to keep things in the family / group, make every post password protected - even something simple like the city name or the name of the group would work.

I have several WordPress sites - MeFi mail if you'd like more info.
posted by chrisinseoul at 6:50 AM on February 6, 2011


Seconding eventbrite for ticket handling - they were great for a series of classes I hosted for ~100 people each. Bonus, you can also restrict ticket sales to only members of your group if that's necessary for you.

Also, meetup.com is great for community groups to plan gatherings, and can handle dues collection (for group membership or to pay for a one-off Meetup Event).
posted by saritonin at 5:03 PM on February 6, 2011


Brown Paper Tickets will pre-print tickets for you, or handle online purchase, for as few as 25 tickets.
posted by Miko at 5:15 PM on February 6, 2011


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