OpenSourcery

Open source software grows up so fast these days. This entry marks this release of Donor Rally Alpha 1, which offers a host of improvements, a winsome new theme, and a few feature enhancements that will help nonprofit organizations use the devotion of their supporters to expand the reach of their fundraising operations.

Download Donor Rally Alpha 1.

Let's take a moment to explore how Donor Rally works. After installing Drupal and selecting the Donor Rally install profile, you'll be asked to choose a payment vendor (this version supports PayPal and Salsa) and set a total fundraising goal. If you're not sure about this yet, don't stress - you can always change it later. After installation you'll be taken to a welcome screen designed to help first time users.

After reading these instructions, you'll want to replace that text with some copy that will welcome your first visitors to the site. To change that text, click the small edit link in the lower right corner of the box.

Your fundraising campaign will consist of two major communication phases. The first phase will be targeted towards friends and fans of your organization who may want to help with your fundraiser. Once you've explained the goals of the fundraiser on the front page of your site, use email, Facebook, Twitter, and whatever other communication tools you have to energize this group of potential fundraising partners. You'll want to ask them to click the Manage Team link, which should direct users to http://yourdomain.com/user/login and then select "Create New Account." Donor Rally uses Profile to manage teams, so each new account will be a team. Teams can represent many participants (often a department at a company or a group of friends) or may consist of just a single person.

After the team is created, the team's donation page is published to a dedicated URL. You'll see a team thermometer on the right sidebar, and a donate now button right below it.

When users click the domate now button they'll be taken to the payment vendor that you chose during the installation process. After the payment is complete, your team's thermometer is automatically raised to reflect the new donation total.

On the front page of the website you'll find a dynamic leaderboard that lists all teams and the total amount of money that they've raised. You'll also see a "Per-capita" ranking that gives smaller teams who pull their weight appropriate consideration.

Now let's look at some things you can do to help get the word out about your campaign. First you'll want to encourage your fundraising teams to use their team page to write a blog post about the campaign. This is what all of their friends will see when visiting the site, so it's important that it communicate your mission in a personal way. To create a blog post, logged-in users can click the "Write a new blog post" link next to their team logo.

The site's administrator has the ability to publish a blog post across all team pages. This is a good way to notify all teams of looming fundraising deadlines or to congratulate them on hitting certain goals along the way. These posts are also displayed to the public, so be sure to stay on message. To write an admin blog post, click the wrench icon in the upper left corner, then Create Content, then Admin Blog Post.

Finally, be sure to use the built-in social networking features. Have your team leaders click the icons on their pages that that will help them spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, and will even use Drupal's mail system to send email to their personal lists.

Though stable and usable right out of the box, this release is targeted towards other Drupal developers who want to help nonprofit causes close to their heart. Our business strategy for Donor Rally begins and ends with: get it out there. So check out the code, follow us on Github, and certainly drop us a note if you are able to use this to stage any nonprofit social fundraising love-fests. That's our model. We do this because we love it.