Project management with Drupal for nonprofit staffers

What does it take to get a Drupal site up and running? How do you keep it running while handling the day to day needs of a small nonprofit organization? Once you have your site, what if you want to branch out and combine Drupal with the power of an open source constituent relationship management system?

I'll share what I learned as the default, and then official, "tech staffer" at a nonprofit news organization that doubled in size (from 4 to 8 staff) in the three years during which it underwent a site redesign, learned how to manage and sustain a daily web presence, and then pursued a CiviCRM implementation for emails, events, and online and snail mail fundraising.

This talk will focus on how to:

  • lead an RFP process for website redesign on top of your other work (in this case, from Dreamweaver to Drupal 6, but also to include other case study examples).
  • manage the flow of site administration tasks and adding new features while handling daily content needs.
  • assess what features might be of most use to your site's community.
  • lead the research and RFP process for CiviCRM implementation, and critically, how it differs from the website redesign process.
  • decide what resources you can trust to help you through these processes and how best to spend your (extremely limited) time cultivating the skills and community connections necessary to be an effective project manager (on top of all your other responsibilities).
Schedule info
Status: 
Proposed
Session Info
Speaker(s): 
Track: 
Government, Nonprofit, and Education
Experience level: 
Intermediate

Comments

I've been on both sides of this process -- first as the "IT/web" staff person at a nonprofit, and then as a consultant/freelancer to nonprofits. And on both ends of the equation, MUCH more is needed in the way of case studies. Some project management techniques can be used from for-profit site development, but some is definitely unique to the nonprofit world. This would be a valuable addition to the Drupalcon lineup.