Sandbox

Before our Joomla/ Mambo days we developed some websites for non profit organisation. These organisation usually had volunteers abroad.

They liked the following features:
-Weblog (with react possibilities)
-Private messaging system
-Webmail possibilities
-Photo log (with react possibilities)
-Guest book.

furthermore they wanted a easy to access url for each volunteer. (a subdomain or subdirectory)

The organisation itself usually wanted a news component, newsflashes, info pages and contact pages (contact form). Multy language was also a wanted feature.

I also know a company called Voys with develops telephonic donation systems. They use 0900 numbers to give people a easy way of donating a small amount. Its a Dutch company witch uses the website www.steunnu.nl. Free translated this mean support now. We implemented that on one of the sites too. They have special (no profit) rates for non profit organisations.

Clients include companies working in Sri Lanka and Haiti.

I work mostly on not-for-profit or govt sites which are not for profit.

Forms are a big deal - allowing contact also statistics - how many - who - where from, what did they do? Since working in govt - the biggest push was towards statistics to justify the effort/money.

Also images and ability to change content quickly rather than a manual way - also the ability for non-technical people to change it easily without copious training.

I do some volunteer work for a NFP organisation and we would dearly love the following items (not in priority order).

A repository for forms/documents/images
An online event organiser (special members add an event/ it gets "authorised"/ then appears in calendar of events
Members can then express interest in events online

plus the usual items - news, latest event added, events in the next month

Forums are less of an issue for us.

Phil - http://www.wildcaretas.org.au

One of the highest priority - and consistent requests from the groups that I am working with is fundraising.  They're looking for a component that makes it easy for people to give (one time, recurring) and a mechanism to track how effective their campaigns are.  There are 3rd party packages out there (e.g., Raisers Edge) but the cost is in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

In my non-profit work, I've found that perhaps the two biggest "wants" that is not available on Joomla right now are these:

(1) More in depth user levels/groups and ability to target specific users or groups (not hierarchical) to specific categories/sections/components/modules, etc.

(2) Support for versioning (with rollback capabilities to restore previous versions if something gets messed up).

I think a lot of the organizations I work with want to be able to delegate responsibilities across staff instead of having a single person in charge of everything, but the user groups/levels aren't deep enough at the moment, and the hierarchical nature of the user groups means it's impossible to do this type of thing at the moment.