OSDI visits WordPress Day, Releases New Plugin

“Keeping track of all the data!” is a familiar refrain for any professional working with nonprofit or political technology. And when asked if they had data integration wishlists, just about every hand shot up at our session last month’s Nonprofit Technology Conference.

VP of Membership Seth Bannon and VP of Marketing Adriel Hampton were speaking at the WordPress Day organized by Cornershop Creative, on how nonprofits can meet their goals using OSDI-compatible technologies and open standards for interoperability. So your WordPress sites talks to your CRM talks to your donation platform talks to your events management talks to your petitions. Easy!

While many of OSDI’s members are focused on progressive political technology, our audience of WordPress developers and fans had an apolitical target in mind for better integration: Blackbaud, the $3 billion software behemoth. We’ll take that as a suggestion and make another attempt to invite Blackbaud to OSDI.

They also voiced support for more OSDI work with CiviCRM, a popular open source constituent relationship management platform that came out of the Drupal community. (OSDI worked with a Google Summer of Code student to create an alpha version of a Civi module.)

Following on the conference in San Jose, Joe McLaughlin, VP of Education, and Adriel met with one of the attendees, a co-founder of the PurposeWP project, to discuss the future of Civi tools and the OSDI standard. PurposeWP aims to create a one-stop-shop for nonprofit technology needs, fully portable and open source.

At WordPress Day, Seth and Adriel showed how to use the free organizing toolset Action Network with WordPress. They performed a live demo using a new OSDI compatible service from Accurate Append, and an OSDI Gravity Forms plugin to to seamlessly sync validated and enhanced contact data from forms directly to an Action Network database.

Data append vendor Accurate Append is an email and phone append and data validation provider with “industry tech” membership in the OSDI coalition.

While politically-oriented tech brands such as Organizer double-down on OSDI with new releases, we urged nonprofit developers to get involved with the coalition by signing up as members and to ask their vendors to support open standards for progressive tech. Every hour saved wrangling data is an hour devoted to working on the causes we care about.