Great FREE Tool:
Organizers' Collaborative

DFIA Co-founder Dr. Alta Price at DemFest
 © 2004 Democracy for Iowa. All rights reserved.


DFIA Co-founder Dr. Alta Price of Bettendorf Reports on a Great Find Coming Out of DemocracyFest

DemocracyFest was a wonderful chance to connect – or reconnect – with outstanding grassroots activists from around the country. Really, from around the world. I met Dean people from Tokyo and Switzerland, on their way to Boston for the convention.

In addition to informal sharing, the organized workshops were fantastic. There were too many to attend them all, and I wasn’t always aware of what was happening when. Fortuitously, I sat next to Rich Cowan of Organizers' Collaborative at lunch (the food was great!) on Saturday, otherwise I would not have known about his workshop.

Organizers' Collaborative is a nonprofit that promotes low cost, easy to use, and open source technology for social change organizers. What I was particularly interested in was the Organizers Database (ODB). ODB is free software for Windows designed to let small campaigns and nonprofits easily manage member, volunteer, and donor information.

Rich and I set up a rough database for DFIA during lunch, stopping only when we decided we had to listen to Joe Trippi (who gave a wonderful speech, by the way). ODB is very flexible, and we can categorize our members in many different ways. Then Rich used the DFIA database we set up as an example during his workshop.

I can’t wait to get our database guy (you know who you are!) working with ODB. I’m going to download it onto my computer and start playing with it. I believe it will handle DFIA’s needs beautifully.

Other groups and small political campaigns will also find Organizers' Database useful. I’m going to ask our blogmistress to find a place for Organizers Collaborative tools somewhere on Blog for Iowa, so other groups can use them, too.

Alta Price

Thanks, Alta!  I will put up a link today.  And stop calling me "blogmistress!"  LOL