Databases for small charities — Knowhow Nonprofit

fgns wrote on Jun 08, 2011

Can anyone recommend a free or low cost off-the-shelf database for our use? We are a small Fulham-based charity running a service to match requests from elderly residents to offers of help from local volunteers. I've looked at the US Son of Service (http://sos.sourceforge.net/) but it doesn't quite meet our needs, as we need to record details of our users. I'm reluctant to buy MS Access and pay someone to develop a database for us, so any tips or pointers would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Simon.

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Lamplightdb wrote on Jun 09, 2011

Hi Simon,

There's a useful comparison matrix of database systems that's been produced by the Charities Evaluation Services here:

http://www.ces-vol.org.uk/index.cfm?format=835

Lamplight are on it and there are a number of others too to suit most budgets. Our system starts at £18/month and should do what you need. We'd be happy to chat if you'd like to know more.

http://www.lamplightdb.co.uk/

Best wishes,

Sarah

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WEditor wrote on Jun 20, 2011

epilepsy_scot replied via Twitter:

"we had our dbase built by a 3rd yr IT student volunteer, best thing we've ever done - try local unis/colleges"

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fgns wrote on Feb 09, 2012

Thanks for responses. We ended up getting pro-bono help from Happy Computers via the Small Charities Coalition, who spent 2 days here and built us an Access database, pretty much to our spec. We also bought Access through the Charity Technology Trust scheme. So the whole thing cost us £19.50 + VAT!

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WEditor wrote on Feb 10, 2012

Wow - brilliant! Thanks for coming back and sharing your success. Links for others interested are:

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Subject: Databases for small charities