New to the sector, our intrepid reporter gets the goods on ‘open’ and ‘open source’ technologies for nonprofit fundraising. Did you even know there was a difference?

By Melissa Busch

So, a nonprofit could customize an open-source software package to create a database to donors the way it wants to track them.

But Quinn cautions that, like most things in life, open source isn’t completely free.

“It’s free to acquire, but getting [open source] up and running is another story,” she says, adding that nonprofits have to be “fairly technical” or have someone on staff who is able to install and maintain it. If not, she says, a nonprofit will have to hire a consultant or a programmer to do it.