But reference material is different. It doesn’t change very often, tends to be related to a lot of other static content, and needs to be easy to search and navigate. A chorister handbook and a corporate intranet portal are good examples.One of the best ways to organize and present static content is with a wiki. A wiki lets you create pages of content, then create meaningful hyperlinks between the pages. Wikis are modern versions of the old Apple HyperCard app, and you’ve probably used the most prominent example – Wikipedia.

One of the best wiki apps is the open source MediaWiki platform, on which Wikipedia is built. Many others are also in use, and the best ones have these features:

• Simple markup language – easier to write than HTML
• Revision history – see what changed, when it changed, and who changed it
• Search – lets you find what you need quickly without having to remember how to navigate
• Access control – limits who can change your content

Here at the Girl Choir of South Florida, we use MediaWiki for our Membership Handbook. We found that most people never bothered to read the printed copy of the handbook, so we moved it online. That way, people can focus on the sections of interest, and it’s easier for us to maintain and distribute.

We also use Microsoft SharePoint for our intranet portal. (SharePoint comes with Microsoft Small Business Server, which I’ll cover in a subsequent post.) It’s the ideal way to write down the ways we do common tasks so that future staff and volunteers can repeat them.

If you’re just starting a choir and you haven’t considered using a finance app, you might be tempted to try tracking the state of your finances in a spreadsheet. But finance apps these days are so inexpensive and easy-to-use that they are well worth the investment, both in software and training.

There used to be a great variety of options in the world of accounting software for small businesses. (Does anyone remember the epic battle between Microsoft and Intuit?) But the choices in financial applications have take a similar path as office apps - there are fewer choices, but the ones that remain are exceptionally good.

These days, the leading options in small business finance software are QuickBooks, Sage Peachtree, and AccountEdge. Any of them will provide a perfectly serviceable solution for your choir. A complete review of any one package is outside the scope of this blog post, but there are many reviews available online.

Here at the Girl Choir, we use QuickBooks Online. Although it has somewhat fewer features that the desktop app, it has everything we need to run our choir. Plus, it gives access to everyone who needs it wherever the happen to be: from any of the computers in the office, from the laptop of our treasurer, or even from the office of our accountant at tax-time.

Subscriptions for our 2011-2012 concert series are also available. Go to girlchoir.org/subscribe to take advantage of all of the great benefits included in your subscription.

Our December performances include:

• Friday, December 9 * at All Saints Episcopal Church in Fort Lauderdale featuring our Concert Choir and Chamber Singers ensembles
• Monday, December 12, at Broward Center for the Performing Arts with the Symphony of the Americas
• Thursday, December 15 *, at Broward Center for the Performing Arts with all of our performing ensembles

One of the easiest ways to spread the word is to use someone else’s contact list, especially if they are local to your area and specialize in reaching your target audience. For instance, two services in South Florida (Organiste and Florida Concert Flyers) offer inexpensive ways to distribute our audition and concert announcements directly to a broad audience interested in the performing arts.

Even if you use someone else’s list for public announcements, you will also need to manage your own contact list. Maintaining your own list allows you to communicate directly with the people that know you best and upon which you rely the most – the singers, audience members, and donors.

A good email marketing service generally offers these features:

• Ease of use
• Excellent form design
• Mobile device support
• Bounce handling and anti-spam control
• Support for subscriber opt-out (see the requirements of the U.S. CAN-SPAM law)
• Integration with other apps (Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, Google Analytics, etc)
• Translation services
• And lots more

Here are some other systems that we have either investigated ourselves or have seen other performing arts organizations use. A detailed comparison would be too long to post here, but other comparisons and reviews are online.

• MailChimp
• iContact
• Constant Contact
• PatronMail

• singers (and, if you’re a children’s choir, their parents),
• staff,
• audience members,
• donors,
• volunteers,
• suppliers,

and lots more.

It’s fairly straightforward to keep a list of these people and how to contact them. Most office automation systems make these incredibly easy.

But a single contact may be connected to other contacts in multiple ways. For instance, a singer may also be a staff member and a volunteer and a donor and a parent. It’s difficult to capture those relationships with a spreadsheet in a way that lets you easily make use of that knowledge.

This is what a contact (or “customer” or “constituent”) relationship management (CRM) system does for you: it allows you to build a model of your world – your contacts, their relationships, and their activities – then use that model to further the goals of your choir.

A CRM system automatically classifies people by their activities. For instance, anyone who has made a donation is a donor, and anyone who has logged a volunteer hour is a volunteer. You don’t mark them manually as such; you just record the donation or the volunteerism, and the system takes care of the rest.

A good CRM should support:

• logging volunteer hours
• tracking memberships and subscriptions (and renewals),
• registration for events,
• donations
• email open/click-through tracking

For instance, we enter each of our singers as individual contacts. We create one group for each of our ensembles, and put each singer in their ensemble’s group. We then enter each singer’s parent, and create a parent-of/child-of relationship between the parent and singer. (One contact may be the parent of multiple singers, which can be in different ensembles.)

Each week, we email a memo to our singers and their parents. The CRM sends the memo to all contacts who are either current singers or have a parent-of relationship to a current singer, and weeds out duplicates so that a parent of multiple choristers gets only one memo.

We use CiviCRM, running on Drupal. It’s open source (free), full-featured, web-based, and customizeable, plus it was designed for non-profits – its user base includes Amnesty International, Wikimedia Foundation, TechSoup, and the Linux Foundation.

Other free and not-quite-so-free CRM systems are available.

If you’re performing at a venue large enough to have a dedicated box office, their services are often included as part of the facility lease. But what if you’re performing at a church, school, or other venue without a box office? Managing all of this by hand is a lot of effort and is highly prone to mistakes.

Fortunately, there are a variety of online services that can do it without busting your budget. Here at the Girl Choir, we use Brown Paper Tickets for managing subscription sales and ticket sales at self-produced events. They deliver every possible service you’d expect, from online sales, box office sales, sales reports, ticket printing, ticket delivery, will-call list generation, a variety of pricing options, discount codes, and more.

And best of all – it’s free for event producers. The BPT service fees are either paid by the ticket buyer at purchase time or can be deducted from your overall ticket revenue during reconciliation.

BPT isn’t the only game in town – there are many other vendors that provide these services as well as other features (such as integration with your web site’s look-and-feel), although most charge a fee to the event producer. One such service that another local choir uses is OvationTix.com.

If you have used or are using another such service, please post a comment and let us know the name of the service and what you think of it.

A CMS is an app that runs on a web server which stores its content in a database instead of as individual pages. The CMS creates each web page as you click, incorporating up-to-the-minute information into the page.

A CMS allows you to add plugins to your site, which are modules that give your site additional features (such as an events calendar, photo gallery, social media feed, or donation button).

A CMS also separates your site’s content from its look and feel. Once you write your pages and blog posts, the CMS publishes them using a “theme” (or “skin” or “template”). By changing the theme, you can completely change the look and feel of your web site without changing the actual content. Themes let you take an off-the-shelf CMS and rapidly turn it into a unique web site.

You don’t need to pay someone to create a CMS for you – the most popular and full-featured CMS apps are open source (read: “free”). They’re very easy to use and require little or no knowledge of web programming languages. Most plugins are also free and easy to install.

The three the most popular CMS apps are WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. You have probably used sites built upon all of them as you’ve surfed, even if you didn’t realize it.

Here are some choral music sites built upon each of these CMS platforms:

• WordPress
• The Girl Choir of South Florida
• Seraphic Fire
• Joomla!
• Choral Music Experience
• Round Rock Community Choir
• Drupal
• San Francisco Girls Chorus
• Vocal Essence

Last week, I blogged about hosting services, and you’ll need one to run a CMS. Most hosting services offer “one-click installations”, which means that with just one click you can get started with your own CMS. It’s really that simple.

I strongly recommend WordPress for building a choral web site. It’s designed for non-technical users, is well-supported by the community, has an extensive array of themes and plugins, and provides an excellent experience for content producers and consumers.

And the price is right – I spent a grand total of $37 to build everything you see on girlchoir.org (yes, I bought a professionally-designed theme for $37).

A CMS will get you started on the path to a professional web site. I’ll cover web design principles for your CMS in a later post.

In previous postings, I discussed must-have apps for your office (the “intranet”), which helps your insiders do their jobs. But any choir that wants to attract audience members, donors, and choristers must also have a presence on the internet.

If the internet is an information superhighway, then a hosting service (or internet service provider, or “ISP”) is an information strip mall.

Choosing a good ISP is important, since your ISP is the foundation upon which your entire internet presence will be built. You should look for the right balance of features, performance, cost, ease of use, and reliability that meets your needs.

A good ISP allows you to …

• Register a domain name. Get yourchoirname.org - read up on guidelines for good domain names.
• Run a web site. The best way to do this is with a content management system (CMS), which I’ll blog about next week.
• Set up email. The ISP will forward mail to an existing account or (even better) allow you to create email addresses on yourchoirname.org.
• Back up your data. The ISP typically backs up both your files and databases in the event of loss.

A good ISP makes this all easy … easy enough for someone who isn’t a member of Geek Squad to be able to manage.

There are three basic levels of ISP service – the more you pay, the faster your web site runs:

• Shared ($0-$10/month). You share a single web server with many other customers of the ISP.
• Virtual Private Server ($15-$50/month). When you outgrow shared service and want to run more complex applications, you’ll need a VPS. You get a dedicated virtual computer which runs on hardware you share with other ISP customers.
• Dedicated ($100+/month). You get your own piece of hardware on which you can run anything you want.

Dreamhost is our ISP. They have good service, an extremely easy-to-use control panel, and lots and lots of features. Plus they provide free (yes, completely free) shared hosting to all 501(c)(3) organizations. We started with shared service, then upgraded to a VPS as our needs grew.

There are many other ISPs. The best way to find a reliable one is to ask folks you know what service they use: other choirs, nonprofits, and similar businesses.

From their site:

TechSoup is a nonprofit with a clear focus: providing other nonprofits and libraries with technology that empowers them to fulfill their missions and serve their communities. As part of that goal, we provide technology products and information geared specifically to the unique challenges faced by nonprofits and libraries. [...] TechSoup Global is working toward a time when every nonprofit and NGO on the planet has the technology resources and knowledge they need to operate at their full potential.

Here’s a sample of the savings the Girl Choir has been offered by TechSoup (your mileage may vary):

• Microsoft Windows 7 Professional
• Retail: $299
• TechSoup: $6
• Microsoft Office 2010 Professional
• Retail: $349
• TechSoup: $31
• Quickbooks Premier 2010
• Retail: $399
• TechSoup: $21
• GrantStation Membership, 1-year
• Retail: $599
• TechSoup: $259
• Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium
  (includes PhotoShop, Illustrator, Audition, and more)
• Retail: $1699
• TechSoup: $170
• Symantec Small Business Protection Suite, 1-year Basic License
  (includes anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-phishing, network backups, and more)
• Retail: $45
• TechSoup: $5

Computers (with Win XP and Office 2007 Basic) for under $200. Color copiers for $2500. Web collaboration services.  Even books, online training courses, and community forums are available through TechSoup.

To qualify, your organization needs to be a 501(c)(3) nonprofit or similar organization in the United States. If your organization is outside the US, TechSoup Global provides similar services worldwide.

Joining TechSoup is easy … and free. Go to the TechSoup web site, click Join TechSoup in the top menu, sign up for a user account, and then register your organization. You’ll need to include proof of nonprofit and 501(c)(3) status, which will be reviewed to be sure you qualify.

Unfortunately, Office is pricey. A single-user, single-computer business license for Office is $199.99, and if you need to add Publisher or Access, the price is to $399.99. If you need Office on multiple computers, this can add up quickly.

You have only three real options:

• Microsoft Office
• Open Office
• Google Docs

(Don’t worry about email in general or Outlook in particular – I’ll cover email solutions later.)

No matter which solution you choose, make sure everyone in your organization is using the same one. Homogeneity today will save you headaches tomorrow.

Microsoft Office

If you can afford it, go for it. There’s no better way to ensure that you’ll be able to exchange documents with other people using Word than if you can use Word.

Fortunately, you can obtain Microsoft Office inexpensively. If your choir is a 501(c)(3) organization (and if you’re not, you should be), TechSoup has an arrangement with Microsoft to provide Office to you inexpensively - as of this writing, you can get a full-blown Office Professional license for only $31 each.

Open Office

If are not a 501(c)(3) organization or you don’t meet Microsoft’s eligibility guidelines, you still have hope. Open Office is an open source work-alike application that mimics much of the functionality of Office.

It doesn’t do everything Office can do, but it does almost anything you need. Plus, you can’t beat the price – it’s completely free, which makes it great for nonprofits.

Google Docs

Google Docs is another Office work-alike application, and – like Open Office – it’s completely free.

Google Docs keeps all of its documents on Google’s servers – “the cloud” – instead of on your local computer. The advantage: your documents are available anywhere you have a web browser. The downside: you cannot access your documents if you don’t have an internet connection.