Blogs | Srijan

Drupal Non-Profit Distrbutions - OpenAction, OpenAid and others

Written by Team Srijan | Jul 5, 2012 7:00:00 AM

The Drupal Community has built custom distributions for various fields of work. In the non-profit space, the popular distributions include OpenAction, OpenAid and Donor Rally. The important content features to look for in a non-profit distribution are:

  1. Blog   
  2. Campaigns/petition
  3. Donations
  4. Events   
  5. Event signup
  6. Forum
  7. Fundraising campaigns
  8. Links
  9. Location/mapping
  10. Media handling, e.g., embedded videos
  11. Member services
  12. Organizations
  13. SEO
  14. Social media links
  15. Spam handling, e.g., Captcha
  16. Volunteer management
  17. Wiki/knowledge base
  18. WYSIWYG editing

OpenAction is an application which is valuable to a wide variety of groups that include universities, corporations, foundations, fellowship programs, conferences, alumni directories, political campaigns, individuals, and more.

The application directly links visitors to the content they care about without ever leaving your community’s umbrella. This leads to an improved experience for your visitors and a “stickier website.”
The service comes with an annual subscription.For a limited time, OpenAction offers discounted rates as well as a free trial.
It is built with flexiblity in mind. To get started, it can sync with any existing data you have or can help you easily crowdsource your information. Customization is a breeze and the tool can be used with any major language.

It can be used as a Map View and a List View. The Google Map markers are integrated with a searchable list. The list aggregates all the content from various users. This makes for an extremely engaging interface. The tag cloud is a visualizer for popular content. Social Links can be created in a breeze.
It also features integartion with popular services like Google Docs, Salesforce and Excel sheets. OpenAction boasts of major clients like NYU Stern, UNICEF and Global Health Council.

OpenAid is a turnkey website platform designed and built by international public health and knowledge management experts to help small NGOs and international development projects create cost-effective program-focused websites quickly.

As a Features-based Drupal 7 distribution, OpenAid provides a basic responsive theme and commonly-needed functionality to allow international development organizations and programs to launch new sites without the need for extensive custom development. Organizations and programs with web development resources can also use it as a starting point to build their own custom sites faster, borrowing from the theme and features provided by OpenAid to create their own. The core features of OpenAid include:

  1. Customizable home page with prominent image carousel and stream of recent updates
  2. Multi-author blog
  3. User profiles
  4. Project profiles, including geographic and categorical meta data
  5. Resource library with support for Apache Solr and faceted search
  6. Partner profiles
  7. Image galleries
  8. The platform also includes blocks for social media links, a pre-configured WYSIWYG editor and CAPTCHA spam blocker, and other useful supporting features. OpenAid is mobile-friendly out of the box, using responsive design techniques to adapt the design seamlessly for mobile browsers.


The non-profit organisations have an important role in creating a more sustainable planet. It is now witnessing a greater visibility thanks to the huge benefits of the Drupal open-source community.