One of Taproot's missions is helping people find affordable solutions for their site needs. One of our areas of interest is working with non profits and organizations. We have a collective background in counseling, psychology, activism, and of course all things web hosting, development, and design. We have worked for several non profits and currently host over 20. There have been some great new open source products developed in the past few years specifically for this genre.

Open source software is developed by groups of programmers who choose to share the code and systems they create instead of charging for them (us geeks like to unite for the common good). This means all the software we use is not only free but we share the base code so we can develop anything if we need to customize something. Then we share our solution back to the group to help others who might also have a similar need.

We decided to offer an open source web based software option for managing institutions, organizations, and non profit web sites and user data in one central place. We use a combination of these open source tools to create a site that lets you manage your own content as well as a CRM (customer relationship management) system to help you manage your constituents. The system we setup is comprised primarily of Joomla (an open source site management suite), CiviCRM (an addon for Joomla to manage constituents), and several other plugins to tackle unique needs.

Using the open source systems Joomla or Drupal and CiviCRM we are able to build a site with the following features to name a few:

• Email list management for your members/contributers
• User membership management
• Event management and registration including online payment
• Directory listing system
• Online donation and donor tracking/management
• Site pages content management including audio, video, images, text, and shared files
• Online store options for selling products or content (videos/audio from conferences, books, articles, etc..)
• CRM tracking for constituents and customers
• Web site news tools, blogging tools, bulletin boards, and social media networking tools

There are many more options available and all the data is stored in a central database that is backed up nightly and can be exported to you through an online tool anytime you want to make a local secure backup of your database.

This eliminates the need to maintain separate databases and email lists to manage your members and users. The system is purely online and can be accessed by your members from any computer with a browser. The system is secure and password protected. The best part is that site management and member management are all done through one system.

Costs: Installation of the software is free as is the software itself. The monthly hosting cost is 24.95/per month. This also gets you up to 100 email accounts and access to an online backup system. See http://www.taproothosting.com for more details about hosting features.

Setup: The software works after it is setup (which is free), however If you need help with customizing the setup or training on using the system we offer that at 55.00/hr. There is online documentation and free downloadable books on how to use the system as well as free user bulletin boards where you can ask questions.

Site design: and there are thousands of free templates for the Joomla and Drupal systems. We can also customize free templates and/or create full custom designs that work with the system. Chipboard Creative is our design site

Support: Taproot offers support for all hosting questions as well as questions regarding Joomla, Drupal, CiviCRM and your site. Billing is only done when we work on the site, questions are all free.

Sign up here for the works plan to take advantage of this setup