The Challenge

Environmental organizations in our region were investing lots of time and money into websites based on outmoded web publishing tools. These tools were hard to learn which meant that organizations had to choose between time-consuming technical training for staff or relying on expensive (and often unresponsive) support from web development consultants. In practice, most organizations did neither. So after investing a lot of time and money to launch their new website, they were left with a glorified online brochure that was rarely if ever updated and fulfilled none of its strategic potential for advancing their programs, getting their ideas out to the public and building connections with people.

The Solution

In late 2003, ONE/Northwest began investigating a relatively new class of software tools called "Content Management Systems" ("CMS"). The primary purpose of CMS software is to simplify the process of publishing content on a website. A CMS can separate the graphical design of a website from its actual content (articles, calendar events, images, etc.) so that the content can be more easily managed.

After a thorough investigation of various CMS solutions that might be suitable for small environmental organizations, ONE/Northwest selected an open source CMS called Plone as our bet for simplifying the website publishing problems of our nonprofit environmental clients. In June of 2004, we launched our "Powering Voices" program and began delivering powerful new Plone-based websites at extremely affordable rates to a growing list of clients.

ONE/Northwest's investment in Plone is a success story that illustrates our unique model for catalyzing innovation and spreading its benefits broadly to the environmental movement. Comparable commercial CMS solutions can run in the tens of thousands of dollars, but as an open source offering, Plone has no licensing fees. Zero.

ONE/Northwest has also invested heavily in streamlining web development consulting processes and taken advantage of Plone's architecture to build software modules and templates that can be used over and over again, in ways that dramatically reduce our costs. When these licensing and consulting process savings are combined, we conservatively estimate that ONE/Northwest is saving our region's environmental organizations well over a half million dollars a year.

More importantly, however, ONE/Northwest is providing environmental organizations with incredibly powerful communication solutions that until now had been the exclusive domain of large corporations. In short, we are "powering the voices" of our clients with the same tool used by large organizations such as Oxfam, eBay, Marriott, Lufthansa, Computer Associates, and NASA (and no, they don't have to be a "rocket scientist" to use it).

These Plone-powered websites are helping organizations evolve the way they communicate with their constituents. Our clients are now in full control of their websites. They now decide what to publish and when without having to learn HTML or coordinate with outside web consultants. With minimal training, an organization can now have several of its staff contributing content to its website. As staff invest in exposing more of their work online, the website slowly transforms from simple online organizational brochure to a powerful mechanism for disseminating ideas, building relationships and running their programs.

We're also working with the broader Plone community -- in the nonprofit sector and beyond -- to increase the quality and quantity of documentation for Plone, to build a regional network of consultants who can deliver solutions powered by Plone, and to connect Plone to other major components of an effective online communications system: relationship management databases and email broadcasting solutions.