I'm looking for donor management systems software, preferably GNU-free, although more important to me right now is doing a good job. I am writing a tiny little internal website on my home machine using PhP and MySQL to keep track of this information, but that's a pretty feature-poor solution.
I want to be able to send receipts and thank you notes to donors, and I want to be able to generate summary reports for the accountant, etc.
At some point I can envision (though I have no concrete plans at the moment for this) a quarterly magazine or report containing news about Wikipedia, a few well-chosen articles, etc. This would be made available free on the web in pdf format or similar, and then donors above some threshold could opt to receive a paper copy if they want.
All of this requires that I be conscientious about properly managing information about donors.
Does anyone have direct experience in this area, with specific advice for me as to what packages exist and what features I should be looking for?
An example of proprietary software: http://www.donorquest.com/ http://www.donorquest.com/pricing.html
This one is completely unacceptable because (a) it is outlandishly expensive, and (b) it only runs under Windows, and I don't even have a windows computer running anymore.
My thinking is that in the long run, an open source solution will make more sense, and not just from an ideological perspective, because we can easily customize it to interface properly with our website memberships.
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Imagine this scenario -- I get a $10,000 donation from someone, out of the blue. I want to telephone them to give a personal thanks. I would of course research them first, tracing their email to a user account and looking at their edit history, to know their interests and work on the website, if any. That's only basic courtesy.
With proper software that integrated everything, I could do all of that with a couple of clicks from an internal donor management system, so that I could afford the time to give personal thanks to much smaller donors.
--Jimbo