[Noisebridge-board] Differentiating affiliate and member donations on Paypal

Rachel McConnell rachel at xtreme.com
Sun Dec 26 22:10:31 UTC 2010


I think that a system for managing memberships and donations ought to
have the following features:

1. a way to list the current members
2. member identifier that doesn't HAVE to be associated with other
identifying info (such as name or email) but that is associated with
their membership status.  This one is hard b/c there has to be SOME way
of doing the association with an anonymous member to the actual person,
and if it's not written down somewhere, it has to be in someone's head.
3. automatic reminder emails (to those whose email address is associated)
4. automatic tracking of received payments
5. way to list members with late payments who need to be followed up with
6. reasonable* security around member info

What other features do we Need?  It's hard to evaluate systems without
knowing our requirements.

I reviewed the Hackerdojo code that they use to manage memberships (and
other things).  It is mostly a wrapper around Spreedly, which is a
wrapper around various payment gateways (such as Paypal).  The
hackerdojo system fails on 2 and 6, although these could be added
easily.  It uses, as noted, Spreedly for handling 3, 4, and I think 5.
It requires that all payments go through Spreedly, which I think is a
nonstarter for us.

Kelly do you have a list anywhere of systems people have evaluated?  I
can start up a spreadsheet otherwise.

Rachel

* 'reasonable' is gonna be hard too, I think.  e.g. I would not want our
member info to be associated with our Google accounts, but I also don't
really want it to be in an encrypted database on someone's server that
they have sole control over.

Jeff Tchang wrote:
> I have not personally used it but I took at look at the functioning demo.
> 
> Here is a list of things that made me want to use it:
> 
> - You can add contacts and track their donations
> - It can generate a donor report
> - It is multiuser and seems to have a good deal of functionality above
> and beyond what we need
> 
> 
> On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 1:29 PM, Andy Isaacson <adi at hexapodia.org
> <mailto:adi at hexapodia.org>> wrote:
> 
>     On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 01:22:07PM -0800, Jeff Tchang wrote:
>     > I wanted to setup http://civicrm.org/ to help manage this. What do
>     you guys
>     > think?
> 
>     I have a horrible allergy to the acronym "CRM". :)
> 
>     Is the software good?  What features does it have that would be useful?
>     What problems does it solve?
> 
>     -andy
> 
> 
> 
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