Soapbox Content Management: Affordable, Usable, Functional (Pick Three)

01:30 PM Mar 30, 2006

My original contact with DemocracyInAction, back when I was in that barber-shop quartet in Skokie, Illinois, came by way of PicNet, a great local ally who configures Joomla (nee Mambo) content management systems. That's PICNet's Ryan Ozimek on the left, staging a charming guerrilla action at NTEN which conjured a mob of inflatable penguins -- the emblem of the Linux project adopted as a general open source symbol -- Friday morning. (below)

The thing about CMSes is that there are about ten million of them, and they basically all require a custom installation to do exactly what any given organization wants them to do, which costs a pretty penny and tends to lock you into a site architecture or business process that you might end up wanting to change. That's why, as a small shop, we ended up taking Ryan's recommendation to save money with DemocracyInAction, but skipped the part about investing the proceeds in a shiny new Mambo install.

It's a problem for everyone and especially for smaller organizations. Part of DemocracyInAction's schtick is to democratize the tools and the space by removing wealth as a requirement for e-activism, and the resultant model has allowed us to work with scores of smart, creative, and really important small and/or local organizations.

What most haven't had is access to an affordable content management tool.

Until now.

PicNet has launched the Non-Profit Soapbox to provide affordable and supported CMS tools for the underserved small-to-midsize sector -- making it possible to get a true content management system up and running for a couple thousand bucks where well into five digits used to be the norm. Says the bathrobe-man:

1) for about $500 we'll take their current design and put it into a Soapbox template.
2) for about $1000 we'll make a new design from scratch
3) for free, we'll let them choose a template made by the community and slap their logo into it.

And for us, an answer to a question we get at least weekly.

Fuller pricing (based on organization size) here, or take a free trial run here.

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