There are amazing resources available for free, and none require hardware or an office. These are all available for Mac and Windows users alike, and charities and social enterprises alike, unless otherwise noted.
CRM / DRM
Customer Relationship Management and Donor Relationship Management is essential for all organisations. CRM often starts off as a phone list, and grows to an accurate, secure record of all information and interaction you’ve ever had with your donors, customers, parters, etc. CRM can answer questions like, show me . . . “a list of all people who donated last year but not this year”, or “all major donors with birthdays in the next month” or “the telephone numbers of everybody who read and clicked on the second link in our last email newsletter”.
Salesforce.com is a powerful, dynamic CRM/DRM tool that is free for all charities and social enterprises up to ten users, and is heavily discounted after that. Salesforce’s main customers are large, for-profit businesses which allows it to give away it’s enterprise product for free. I discuss Salesforce in depth here. The ability of Salesforce to reduce headaches, provide instant, actionable information and help organisations grow is amazing.
Websites
All organisations need websites. The following companies provide them for free. One thing to keep in mind is minimising, or not using at all, Flash. While flash can make your site look ‘pretty’, it doesn’t work on smartphones, and not all tablet or pad computers will work with it either.
- Google Sites – my preference, as it allows easy integration into your organisation through Google Apps. This option is perhaps the most simple and also the most scalable, allowing as much space and visits as your organisation requires. Example 1 2 3.
- Yola provides free websites, the only required advertising is a barely seen link on the bottom. Examples of yola websites.
- Charities Technology Trust can help charities (not social enterprises, sorry) through Charity Websites through an arrangement with Terapad.
Email, Calendaring and Document Collaboration
- Google Apps, as well as providing websites through Google Sites, provides enterprise level email, calendaring and document collaboration. This is one of the two main cloud computing platforms I focus on offering to social enterprises. Their standard platform is free up to 50 users and is often all you will need, while their premium is £35 a user a year and adds a number of features. If you are considering MS Exchange or MS Small Business Server, this is an excellent, low-priced and reliable alternative.
Backup
- Dropbox works on Mac, Windows and Linux, and has a free version up to 2 GB of storage. Dropbox is more of a collaboration tool between colleagues, or a tool that lets someone work from home or work on the same desktop-based files. Dropbox provides effective backup for a rolling 30 days worth of changes.
- iDrive doesn’t have the sharing capailities of Dropbox, but if you need a long term backup solution, turn to iDrive. Again, free for accounts up to 2 GB, iDrive will keep a copy online indefinitely, unlike Dropbox where you can only restore files lost or deleted in the last 30 days.
