We live in a non-profit housing cooperative and are looking at options to bring our community to the digital age. We currently have a very basic static website that hasn't been updated in years. We've been discussing the idea of upgrading our website and adding some community features.
I'm no expert but I'm comfortable with tech (I have purchased way too many AppSumo deals…) and have played a bit with WordPress in the past. I'm wondering if WordPress (with some plugins) would meet our need or if we should be looking at something else.
Important note: We don't have much budget for this but what got us thinking about a new website is the fact that we recently got approved for the Microsoft for Nonprofit program which includes a $2000 annual grant in Azure and clouds services. We thought perhaps we could use this to build/host a new website. I'll need to check what the Azure offer is since the last time I used something from them was probably 4 or 5 years ago… In the meantime I thought perhaps reddit might be able to tell us what tools we might want to look into. WordPress is the only website platform I have played with before. Perhaps there are better options… If it's something we can do using our Azure grant that would be fantastic!
Here is a short list of features that would be useful (we're still at the brainstorming stage).
For everyone:
- Info about our community
- How to apply to our waitlist
- It would be great to be able to collect applications in digital format instead of the current multipages paper forms we currently ask them to print and mail us.
- perhaps ask that they first verify their email to prevent bots, etc?
For members of our community only:
- A Forum with:
- Section for all members, to discuss whatever they want
- Private Sections
- One for each of our committees (to host private conversations between members of each committees)
- One for our elected board directors only.
- A Blog to keep our members updated.
- It would be great if we could give members an option to submit posts. They would first need to be reviewed before appearing on the blog
- Newsletter (Could also be instead of the blog)
- Monthly, In a format that we could also send by email and print.
- (We have a few elderly members who have yet to go digital).
- Could include
- Update from our board of directors
- Content from our blog
- Perhaps highlight some interesting discussion from the forum.
- Again, it would be great if members could submit content for the newsletter
- Monthly, In a format that we could also send by email and print.
- Our coop rules, useful info, FAQs, resources, etc.
While brainstorming we also added these to our "dream" list:
- A section that would allow members to upload documents that would be linked to their profile. For example members currently send us copies of their car insurance every time they renew.
- Security/privacy risk so would need to be bullet proof…
- An AI bot that would attempt to answer questions about rules, policies, etc.
Thanks for your help
This would be possible in WordPress although it will take a fair amount of time if you haven’t used WordPress a ton.
Look into bbpress for the forum and for the newsletter you should be good with mailchimps free tier. You’ll need a contact form plugin for your waitlist. The blog functionality is built into WordPress and you can allow users to make an account and give roles to them to be able to submit posts. You could also build user profiles pages and allow them to upload documents but I wouldn’t have any sensitive info stored like that.
The chatbot might be hard to get on a budget, without putting significant time or resources.
vBulletin or phpBB are good options.