A substantially upgraded version of PowerBase will be completed by early May. Read more about the PowerBase upgrade.

New Features Included

There’s some exciting development in the works. Read about the new features we’re working on for PowerBase.

What PowerBase will cost your organization is going to be different from what it would cost a different organization. Different organizations need different things but in general, any organization getting up and running with PowerBase, or any database, is going to need some combination of the following services:

1. You’ll need the database itself, and for an online database, you’ll need it hosted, and you’ll want to account for maintenance of the server, security and regular software updates, and backups
2. You’ll need to transfer your data from your existing database into the new database – in this case, PowerBase. This transfer process will likely include some amount of data cleaning since it’s not in the nature of data to stay particularly clean, and you’ll need clean data going in to PowerBase. [ Note: What the heck do we mean by clean data? Basically, what we mean by clean data is that the data is in the correct format – addresses broken out correctly – only one name in the name line – i.e. you don't have “John and Lucinda” in a firstname field, and “Johnson” in the lastname field for that record.] There are a wide variety of errors and issues with data, and they all need to be taken care of so that you can transition to a new database. View an online training on data cleaning if you’re interested.
3. Once you’ve got your data cleaned, you’ll need to get your new PowerBase configured to accept the data you’re importing, and this will also include the creation of any necessary custom fields and things of that nature.
4. Then you’ll need to import your data into the new system. This always takes longer than you want it to, and you almost always run into unforeseen issues.
5. Next you’ll want to be sure that the data did import properly – so you’ll click through, run some queries, and basically convince yourself that you a) didn’t lose anything and b) that everything imported into the right places.
6. And once you’ve done all of that? It’s time for training and support. This is the most important part of using a database effectively, and it’s the part that is most often overlooked and under-resourced. Minimally, you’ll want to invest in training for one person – your database point person, to become skilled enough that they can train and support the rest of your staff with little to no need for outside assistance. Three notes on this:
   • this process of becoming proficient can take time and
   • if you want this to work, you need to make sure that the person has dedicated time in their schedule for this training and support role.

One last thought on training and support – nonprofit IT folks used to say that training and support should/could reasonably be 60%-80% of your budget for a project and/or overall technology infrastructure. We’ve backed off of hard numbers like that, but find that we’re still putting together projects where the training and support – the ongoing
costs – account for a large percentage of a group’s IT spending. My recommendation is that you plan for all your staff to have access to the online training they need, and select a smaller group to attend the in-person trainings that make sense for your goals and needs.

So – how does this relate to PowerBase? You’ll need a combination of the above services, and the combination that you need will be determined by the quality and amount of the data that you have now, and it will be determined by the type of training and support that you want. The “sliders” or things that you can change to impact the cost are:

• Where, how, and who cleans your data – PTP, your staff, a volunteer?
• Who imports your data – PTP, a volunteer, a staff person?
• How much support – if any – you want in the cleaning and importing process
• How much training you want
• How much and what type of technical support your want
• How much – if any – on site consulting you want from PTP to help you utilize your database most effectively

Given all these factors, the least that you’ll pay to get PowerBase would likely be right around $2,000, and the most you’d pay would be $17,000 or more if you wanted strategic consulting assistance.

What it comes down to then is a question of what support and services you need to accomplish your goals. Fundamentally, investing in your database infrastructure is about investing in your ability to increase the scale of your organizing so that you win power to change things. Please let us know how we can help you define the services and support to contribute to your success.

If you’ve been watching this project, wanting to get up and running with PowerBase, PTP is happy to say that PowerBase is ready for you.

Check out a demo if you haven’t already, take a look at the features, and otherwise generally poke around the site. Once you’ve had a chance to take a look at PowerBase, you’ll have the opportunity to sign-up and we’ll help you get started using PowerBase.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Progressive Technology Project (PTP) has a pilot project running using Powerbase, an enhanced version of CiviCRM for base-building community organizing groups. I am responsible for two of the four sites, a community group in Oakland and one in San Diego. I did a site visit last week and wanted to share some of the feedback I received with the community here. As PTP further develops this database project, we hope to keep contributing to CiviCRM and we thought sharing what comes up could be one way for us to do that.

Read the rest

• Asian Pacific Environmental Network
• Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education (SCOPE)
• NYC AIDS Housing Network
• Environmental Health Coalition

How’d we pick them?

Interestingly, the groups in the pilot picked us – at least in part, because they approached us with database needs at the time that we were starting to plan and commit internally to tackling PowerBase.

As our internal planning proceeded, we realized that we’d want to partner with groups who were a) actively engaged in base-building organizing; b) actively needed a database solution right now; c) had some experience/culture of using a database; d) represented, in aggregate, a broad cross section of the organizing universe; e) were on-board with the concept of trying to build a database that can work across organizing groups – or, more succinctly, groups that shared and were excited by the vision and potential of PowerBase.

You’ll be hearing from us – and hopefully some of them – as the process moves ahead.

Incidentally, there have been some really exciting developments in the CiviCRM development community of late, including some really fantastic work on CiviReports as well as a truly impressive project that’s being taken on to improve the internationalization (translatability) of CiviCRM. If you’re not tracking their work, definitely check it out for a preview of what we’ll be working to integrate into PowerBase.

Here’s the vision:

A database – a CRM or constituent relationship management system – that in an off-the-shelf way meets 95% of the needs that community organizers need from their CRM for their membership engagement work.  We think PowerBase – PTP’s version of CiviCRM – is that database.  The field needs a common platform; the hodgepodge of cobbled together databases and half-functional CRM systems has become too big an impediment to building real power to be ignored any longer.  When we’re done, groups that are using PowerBase will be able to:

• Use their database to help build the scale of their organizing work
• Swap notes about how they do their work at a level much, much deeper than they can today.
• Build to an entirely different scale: Have an issue blow up fast and need to do a rapid mobilization at scale? Organizers from allied organizations will be able to jump into your system cause they’ll already know how it works.

How’d we get here?

For more years than we’d care to remember, Progressive Technology Project has been saying that a high-performing data system was the heart of organizing.  Through our VOTER project last year, we learned a lot.  A whole lot – and we’ll be reporting on that later, but as far as the CRM question is concerned, we learned that many, many, many groups didn’t have a fully functional database for membership management.  It sort of took the integrated out of Integrated Voter Engagement, and was the kick that we needed to take this on.  [fyi - with our help, the groups are accomplishing the integration, but with more time and trouble than anyone would like]

So, we created a requirements list – what does a community organizer need to do, day in and day out over the course of a campaign cycle?  We drew on our 10+ years of experience in the field, and then vetted the list with any organizer who was willing to look at it (and if you hit that link above, you can look at it, and comment on it too – please do).  What we learned was that the list we’d created was spot on for the basic level of CRM needs that organizers have.  That may not sound like much.  It is actually a lot – a vetted requirements list meant that we’d listened, and had correctly heard, interpreted, and then reflected back what organizers need.  List in hand, we were ready to move to step two: what’s already out there?

What’s already out there?

We contracted with Jamie McClelland of MayFirst/People Link fame to do a scan of the terrain.  Here’s what we gave him as guidelines:

• Has to be Open Source
• Has to be web-based
• Has to be affordable to host
• Has to be multi-lingual/translatable/internationalize-able
• Has to be in use in the real world
• Has to have an active developer community

What Jamie came back with was a short list that when whittled down, pointed at CiviCRM as the top contender.  We weren’t terribly surprised to hear that.  PTP had been hearing more and more really good things about CiviCRM for past 6 months or so, and had started seriously looking at it ourselves.

Jamie completed the research phase by taking our requirements list and identifying what work needed to be done to get CiviCRM to meet our requirements – changes to the configuration, changes to the templates, or changes to the code.

Where we are now:

That pretty much brings us up to the present.  We’ve had conversations with the CiviCRM folks – they’re psyched we’re doing this project.  We’ve had conversations with community organizing groups – they’re psyched and want to get on the system NOW.  We had a deep conversation with our board – the memorable phrase from that meeting was “my brain is exploding in a million different directions and it is wonderful.”  Needless to say, they’re psyched too.

So, it’s time to get to it.  Thanks to support from the Ford Foundation, we’re doing a pilot project, getting between 4 and 6 organizations up and running on CiviCRM, and using that process to build our initial version of PowerBase.  We’re starting the pilot now, working with DharmaTech, a CiviCRM development shop to help us get started, and by the end of the summer, expect to have a functioning release of PowerBase that meets our initial list of requirements.

What next?

Large scale rollout.  How large?  We think there are around 1000 groups that self-describe as using community organizing as a core strategy for their work.  That number might be a bit low, it might be a bit high, but probably not by much.  [And hey - if you're reading this, and you think we don't know about you and should - join our Directory of Community Organizing groups here]

In late fall of 2009, we’d like to start a process to get more groups up and running on PowerBase.  Parallel to that effort, we’ll engage groups in a conversation about what parts to build next – Voter file integration?  Coalition level data consolidation?  Mobile interface?  Texting integration?  Virtual Phonebank/VoIP hooks?

So, stay tuned – we think this is pretty exciting work that has broad implications for community organizing.  Subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up on what’s happening, and come back often to share your comments, feedback, and thoughts.