PICnet Blog

In an effort to help spread the word of open source content management systems (CMS) and constituent relationship management systems (CRM), I was asked to give a talk at OneWorld on March 28, 2007 to the OneWorld Peer Learning Exchange. Roshani Kothari from OneWorld was gracious enough to write up some great notes on it (see below) as well as post a podcast of this.

Listen to the MP3 of the talk

Thanks to Roshani for her hard work to make these OneWorld Peer Learning Exchanges occur, and to my co-presenters Alan Rosenblatt and Guy Stevens for their contributions.

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As Non-Profit Soapbox continues to grow in the non-profit community, we have listened and responded to our clients’ ideas, pains, and comments. Surprisingly, what we hear most doesn’t have much to do with the core of Soapbox and Joomla, but rather the struggles of linking together a Web site with an organization’s database, or CRM system.

We haven’t taken this issue lightly, and as we discussed two weeks ago, we’re heavily involved in building bridges between Soapbox and the leading CRM systems for non-profits, starting with Democracy in Action.

What makes Soapbox a success for non-profits is that it goes beyond the core of just being a Web site manager, and allows organizations to connect more seamlessly to their CRM systems. That ability to present data from the database, and choosing the presentation of that data in the Web site is what will be the main differentiator between CMS choices for non-profits.

As CRM vendors are feeling the pressure from clients to provide open APIs, PICnet is stepping up quickly to act on this new opportunity for our clients. Although we’re weary of the all talk and no walk, we’re willing to take vendors on at their word. We’re building the bridges between Soapbox and the following CRM systems:

• Democracy in Action
• GetActive
• Salesforce.com

Our goals are simple when building these bridges:

• empower organizations to choose where they place their data
• provide choice for the presentation of data from their chosen CRM
• simplify the Web experience for organiation’s Web site visitors

Over the next few weeks, we will be releasing J!DIA to the community as an open source component for Joomla. Soon thereafter, we will begin working with GetActive and Salesforce.com to build similar functionalities for building bridges between Web sites and databases. Stay tuned, we’re empowering non-profits with choice.

One of our most interesting projects in the PICnet Labs is J!DIA, which brings together Joomla with the Democracy in Action database in ways in which we’ve never been able to achieve before.

Imagine the following situations that could make your members and supporters lives easier when interacting with your organization through your Joomla-based Web site:

• allowing users to login and edit their DIA profile directly within Joomla
• enabling members to be able to search a member’s only directory stored in the DIA database, all within Joomla and without any wrappers
• adding new supporters in DIA database using Joomla, without needing to do so through the DIA headquarters
• allowing users to login to Joomla and view all their past donations and events attended that are stored in DIA

One of our fearless Joomla developers, Chris Garvis, is very close to putting together what we call J!DIA. This component will provide never before seen access to the Democracy in Action system directly through an organization’s Web site. Before J!DIA was developed, most of the display of data in DIA, for most organizations, would need to be presented in the DIA headquarters via wrappers.

We’ve changed this paradigm for Joomla users, enabling the Joomla CMS and your Web site’s stylesheets control the output, look, and feel of the DIA data in a format you completely control.

We’re eager to get this out to the community as soon as possible, and once we have a proof of concept, we’ll let you know. But right now, know this: we’re about to make life much easier for Joomla administrators that are also using DIA.

And Non-Profit Soapbox users, you’ll be happy to know this will be included in all our Non-Profit Soapbox sites in the near future.

More details coming soon.