ebase® is a series of Filemaker Pro® templates developed for use by nonprofit organizations to manage their relationships with their community: members, donors, activists, clients, volunteers and constituents.

ebaseClassic (Version 1.x)

ebase 1.00 was released in the fall of 1998 and was designed to meet the fundraising, membership management and advocacy needs of the smallest grassroots organizations. ebase 1.0 was the product of a list enhancement effort involving more than 15 environmental organizations located in the Northern Rockies. ebaseClassic is still available to ebase members and has found a cult following amoung small nonprofit groups around the world.

ebasePro (Version 2.x)

ebasePro was released in the spring of 2002 and was designed to meet the information management needs of medium-sized, nonprofit organizations with access to adequate technical support. ebasePro offers a portable, customizable and extensible open-source data model. ebasePro was developed using open-source principles, involving over 100 developers with feedback from hundreds of people over an 20-month period.

ebasePro is a better fit for organizations that want to integrate their website and email into their constituent communications strategy and want and want to track more than solicitations and financial contributions. ebasePro allows groups to develop more complete and sophisticated profiles of their volunteers, constituents and members; and leverage those profiles with the power of email communications.

Background

ebase was created in the late-90's to address a critical technology need in the nonprofit sector, where the cost of fundraising management applications published by private companies averaged nearly $5,000. A market analysis conducted in 1997 indicated that 98% of all nonprofits used home-grown fundraising databases, and the vast majority were not satisfied with their solution.

Since the release of ebase in October 1998, more than 35,000 organizations world-wide have downloaded the templates. The ebase templates were originally developed by a nonprofit called Desktop Assistance (based in Helena, MT), over an 18 month period beginning in 1996 as a result of a membership and constituency building effort by a number of environmental organizations in the western United States. ebase 2 was developed and supported by the New York-based TechRocks until it's demise in 2002. Recoginizing a good application (but lousy business model), ebase was acquired by Groundspring.org in the spring of 2003.

While at Groundspring, the ebase project team worked with the team that eventually launched CiviCRM, another open-source CRM application, to share ideas about how nonprofits can best manage their constituencies.

Funding

In the spring of 2005, ebase.org reverted back to it's original host, and is now a self-supporting, all-volunteer organization. The programming and distribution of the original ebase modules were supported by the Turner Foundation, Wilburforce Foundation, Brainerd Foundation, Surdna Foundation, Educational Foundation of America, Rockefeller Family Fund, Beldon Fund, Bullitt Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Northwest Fund for the Environment, REI Foundation, and FileMaker, Inc.

The development of ebasePro was underwritten by the Turner Foundation and the Surdna Foundation, and the transition to and from Groundspring.org was generously supported by the Surdna Foundation.

Currently, ebase.org is supported almost entirely by membership contributions and small donations.

Our goal is to continue to sustain the effort through this approach. Technical support Technical support for ebase is provided to ebase community members through this web site and a variety of support services such as remote consulting, onsite consulting, training workshops and online email lists.

More importantly, ebase users rely on each other to help resolve technical problems via the email lists, local ebase user group meetings, and informal contacts. ebase was an experiment to test the proposition that nonprofit users can support each others use of technology more effectively and economically than commercial vendors.

The survival of ebase is a testament to the constructive dynamic that exists when groups work together to solve common problems. The experiment continues to move forward only with the goodwill and effort of ebase community members.