http://yandleblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/organization-personas.html

(I hope you mind mind me linking to myself in this way.)

Jon, this is an excellent bundle project, indeed.
By the way, one might consider other elements of the Plone4Artists bundle, including the calendar…

I can tell you’re undecided about Plone and blogs, as your blog is on wordpress

Get that stuff into the Collective my friend!

The staff/board/vounteer tool sounds particularly great. I can’t wait to see it!

Full-text indexing is excellent, but in the roadmap for Plone 3.0, so I didn’t list it here.

Great start! I’ll have to investigate some of those tools!

A couple of things that we’re doing that seem like winners and frequent requests:

1. Staff / Board / Volunteer listing tool that you build with a form to populate those lists, including both a thumbnail and a larger picture. We haven’t productized this yet - but - we want to!

2. The cool “add a PDF file and have its contents indexed” feature.

3. Rotating image gallery where users just drop pictures (all the same size, mind you!) into a folder to populate that image gallery. Use some cool coding to sniff for Flash so it degrades nicely.

I’ll keep thinking - this is a really terrific start!

My post didn’t mention it, because I’ve blogged about it a number of times before, but my thinking draws very heavily on the excellent research of my friend Leda Dederich at dotOrganize (http://www.dotorganize.net), which lays out NGO requirements. That said, Plone can’t possibly meet ALL of an NGO’s technology needs — it’s a CMS, not a miracle worker!

NGO’s main concerns are usually:
*internal operations
*fundraising
*member outreach
*general communications
*education of their constituency
*press/ media relations
*advocacy

At a general level these concerns can be reflected in technology by the following examples,
*almost all organizations would be served well by a web site that was integrated with an Intranet.
*Many organizations have four or so levels of site visitors who need access to different types and levels of information (site visitors, volunteers/supporters, paying members, staff).
*Most organizations have calendaring needs, newsletter and press operations.
*Well run organizations need well designed and integrated communications such as RSS, email, SMS, cell/phone/VOIP, postal, discussion boards/listservs, etc. These can be for one to one communications, instant alerts, phone trees, etc.
*Organizations often need fundraising tools that already exist and need to integrated with other aspects of the site/Intranet or need whole new ones that both bring in donations and help with reporting requirements.
*Advocacy organizations need tools that help them as an organization get information out to supporters, focus grassroots support on elected officials.
* Etc.

(one major requirement independent of an NGO’s general concerns, is that the site be easy to set up, administer and maintain. Plone is easy to administer and maintain. But Plone is more difficult than it should be for NGO’s to set up the web site in Plone (especially when using the look and feel of the old site). A fix to this would require one or two simple tools to allow the template (not Plone template, but the “look and feel” and design) to be applied in minutes with no Plone (TAL/METAL) experience needed.)

My feeling is concentrating first on the needs of the NGO’s will then drive the decisions on what products should be added (or created) and how to integrate them with the core data an NGO uses as well as outside tools that will continue to be used. An effort should be made to consolidate the core data as much as possible (member data for example).

Great idea. You can also look into NGO-in-a-Box at http://ngoinabox.org/

Quills has more developers, an open SVN repository, is better tied into the mainstream of the Plone community and is moving much faster towards a Zope-3 style approach. That said, I’m not yet convinced its the “one true blog solution” for Plone — but it appears to be the strongest contender right now. Blogging and Plone is a challenging topic area, precisely because there are several contenders, but none that are truly 100% where we’d all like them to be.