CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,
I'm volunteering for a NPO and trying to find something that would be good to utilize for us. We are looking for something that can do the following things.

1.  Website integration to allow for different parts of the organization to collect information and utilize it effectively.  The website must be able to have different sections and different member levels.  For example, we have a preschool and an outreach program.  Can a site be setup that all the information is kept in one place, but divided based on membership.  Also when members login they get access to what is relevent for them.  Preschool parents, and kids could have their own community and pages, while outreach would have the same?  Basically this would be a main site for the organization as a whole, but subsites for all the different arms of the organization for their various communities, and needs?  What base platform would be good, and allow for flexibility as well as ease of use by the staff of the organization.   Drupal, wordpress, joomla, etc.

2.  Project management.  To allow members of the organization to collaborate and work together on projects as well as utilize volunteers.  Repository for documents and information for different parts of the organization.  Perhaps webdav access to allow access from desktops of the staff.

3.  Accounting some sort of accounting integration, or ability export/import information with quickbooks for NPO.

4.  Contact Management - From what I can see CiviCRM does this well, but can contacts be separated based on the different arms of the organization such as the preschool and outreach?

5.  Fundraising and fundraising campaigns - It seems Civi CRM manages this well.

6. Accept CC and registration of members for different programs.

7.  Volunteer management - keep track of time spent, scheduling, as well as maybe project management access to allow for remote volunteers to be involved and monitored with onsite staff ie grant research, fundraising research etc.

8.  Inventory management - keep track of inventory of the organization based on grant purchases as well as what is available on site.  This would allow reallocation of assets as well as site coordinators to work with other site coordinators to move assets around.  Record consumption of assets as well.

9.  Grant application tracking.  Track Grant proposals, as well as stay on top of renewal processes.

10.  Track capacity building processes.

11.  Track employee timesheets and scheduling.

I guess this is a lot, but we are trying to find a good solution that we could put in place that is cost effective, yet meets the needs of the organization. Dealing with 5 different apps to manage every part of the organization hasn't worked well.  Comments and suggestions would be very much appreciated.  Currently we are looking at vtiger, civicrm, and salesforce as options.

Second petednz. I would question the 8, 11 and probably 10. It would certainly be feasible to create something that would satisfy your needs with CiviCRM, but it is likely to require a reasonable amount of customization. So hopefully you have sufficient PHP/MySQL skills available?
Alternative is to use other software for these issues and link them to CiviCRM using the API. All of this depending on what you actually require, hard to answer with a few lines :-)

Good luck!