[Wikipedia-l] Donor management

[Jimmy Wales]

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.

-----

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