When we first started Development Seed, with the goal of working one on one with NGOs to help them create websites that help their organization both internally and externally, the problem seemed simple… non-profits do not have the financial resources to pay for a good site. If they do get some cash on hand to pay for a site or a volunteer to build it the investment is traditionally looked at as a one time expense, just like printing a newsletter. Thus the site never changes nor grows and the organization is not capitalizing on the Internet as a method of communicating, which is an ongoing process, but rather just having some basic background literature in electronic format.

Ian and I have been working more and more with organizations who not only want to have an external site but also an internal site. Small non-profits seem to be interested in an internal site to help manage communication with volunteers and staff members in different locations around the country and world. At Development Seed we are using the CMS Drupal, both for our public blog that you are reading right now and our internal blog, where we post files, have ongoing threaded discussions that are organized into various categories, and a calendar of events and deadlines. Our internal site puts all our communications in one centralized location that is secure. Files that we regularly need access to our easily accessable. Our discussion that used to take place via email are now on the site in a much more organized system that threads all comments to a particular topic in one place without having to go searching through all the old emails. To let us know when we should check the internal site we are atomically notified when there has been new addition (ie file uploaded, new discussion topic, comment to an existing topic, even on the calendar) by email.

With a system this great for basic communications we have been puzzled why more clients are not saying “yes!!!, sign me up”, after all Development Seed sets it up and the software is free. Unfortunately, unlike our site design that we can show off the internal sites contain private correspondence and thus we don’t have a show case of the work that we have already done for public viewing …. And seeing and experiencing is believing. So we initially started off by telling inquiring clients where to go read more about Drupal on the official Drupal site, www.drupal.org. When clients asked about databases to manage donors and contact lists we would direct them to software that we support that is documented on www.sourceforge.net.

It is the time, not just the cash…

What we have realized is that clients simply do not have the time to read up on the specifics of these great open source programs. They want to be told what will work for them and shown how it works. At first this was contrary to what I often thought was one of the most important assets about the open source community… choice. But living in an age of Microsoft everything people do not think about options… they want a god advertisement to say “I am the software that you need” and boom that is it.

So Ian and I have now found ourselves creating essentially advertisements for open source software that we support by creating demo sites that push themselves. Check back in the next couple of weeks to see our demo site of Drupal for dummies. We will of course have lots more to say in the coming months about how this new selling approach works. Eventually at some point we might have a comment section on the site where people can rate the small selection of software that we encourage much like Tech Soup http://www.techsoup.org/products/downloadpage.cfm?downloadcat=8 , but much less technical than sourceforgre.net. Any thoughts on software that we should look into? Post a comment to this entry.