Drupal Content Management System
We have to say this about Drupal. We have never seen a development process so heavily invested by in a group of ad hoc developers, yet managing to be focused, controlled, carefully-coded and oriented toward a larger vision of building useful community software. The pace is head-spinning at times, but this project has much to offer labor unions.
This is the open source process working at a level only exceded by projects like Firefox, Apache, and Zope - and they all have foundations or corporations that support them. Drupal doesn't, but that too is in the works. Recently, Google funded the development of several components.
The best news is that a team of developers has hitched onto the Drupal bandwagon and started a programming initiative that is specifically focused on creating organizing software.
The CIVICRM module allows you to maintain a comprehensive web database of your members, supporters and any other group you want to keep records on.
Unions maintain relationships with many types of constituents. They track and solicit members, recruit activists, track employers, and maintain relationships with the public for advocacy purposes. They send out newsletters and invite people to events. CiviCRM enables unions to maintain all this information in a single database, creating efficiencies and new opportunities for unions to better communicate and benefit from relationships with their constituents.
You can gather data from:
- Web site visitors. You can expose data fields during the user sign-up process on your web site.
- External databases.
Database fields are customizable through a web browser, and data gathered through the Web can be exported to use in your office database.
You can assign users to groups, conduct searches based on all database fields.
For example, you can search via Zip code and send an email to all users in a particular Zip code; if you have a field for a member's employer, you can search on that basis and send email to employees of a particular employer.
The volunteer module allows visitors to signup for events, and their participation can be managed via emails sent from your web site.
The RSVP module allows site administrators - and, optionally, visitors who have registered on your site - to email friends with invitations to events you have posted on your event calendar.
An adminstrative interface allows them to manage responses to the invitations.
The Citizenspeak module allows visitors to your site to send a form letter to whatever email addresses you have selected in advance (Congress, newspapers, etc.).
You can run multiple email campaigns. Creating an email campaign page is as easy as posting any other web page. Site visitors who participate will have their contact information saved in the CRM database (feature still in development).
There's much more, too much too list.
