Need to know who I'm president of!

February 11, 2008 11:59 AM

I'm looking for a way to organize a list of members of my neighborhood association, preferably something web-based, but that doesn't require the actual members to log in.

I'm the (new) president of my neighborhood association, and our membership database is, well, a nightmare. As in: a laundry hamper full of slips of paper at the treasurer's house. Plus I have a small stack of sign-in sheets from our general meetings.

I would really like to get something together to track who's paying dues, who comes to meetings, etc.

I started playing with a spreadsheet last year, but I couldn't figure out a good way to record years of membership and meetings attended, especially over more than a year or two.

I would love to have something web-based that I could just hand off to future board members without worrying about what kind of computer/software they have.

Our current web setup is LAMP, with some flexibility of what we can install/run. I have enough PHP expertise that I can definitely futz around with something close but not quite, but would prefer not to have to do a ton of work or write the whole dang thing myself. Something that interops with WordPress would be nifty but in no way necessary.

Most of my searches thus far have turned up things for managing membership of a web site, which is entirely NOT what I'm looking for.

Hive mind, can you help?

posted by epersonae to computers & internet (5 comments total)

CiviCRM would do the job, but may be overkill. It's a full fledged open source CRM application initially developed by a political campaign, but very well adapted for membership organizations. It can be run within Drupal or Joomla.
posted by advicepig at 12:06 PM on February 11

Although I'm not actually using it for anything at the moment, I'm impressed with dabble db. This is a hosted, for-fee service. You design a relational database on the fly. Really slick.

Wikidbase is like a wiki, but with structured fields.

And it may not be ideal, but you could use Google Docs spreadsheets, although you'd probably need an elaborately linked set of them to make it do all the things you'd want.
posted by adamrice at 12:07 PM on February 11

StaffTool was created with churches and non-profits in mind, but may be suitable for your purposes as well.
posted by odinsdream at 12:15 PM on February 11

StaffTool is here.
posted by exphysicist345 at 3:45 PM on February 11

Thanks -- I'm still looking, but dabble db and CiviCRM look rather promising. (Drupal integration may be overkill.)

Wikidbase looks scary; StaffTool doesn't have any way to manage dues paying as far as I can tell, and a GDocs spreadsheet was what got me to this point. :)

I'm also taking a peek at Zoho's database thing, to see if free beats dabble db's elegance.
posted by epersonae at 4:43 PM on February 11