As an in-house web designer for an NGO, I’ve gained some notions on what their needs are or at least what they can be as far as publishing content on the web and promoting their activities.

Normally, they need a space for donations, volunteering, news, calendar and public relations; just to name a few. This usually means that they need some serious updating on a daily basis.

Cost effective

Since money can be an issue, these organizations can’t afford to flush all their budget in developers and programmers for life. Instead, they choose to have simple but useful websites that are friendly to their users: in most cases public relations team or communications team.
This way, their site can be updated by people they already have, so there’s no need to hire more staff.

Easy to implement

Thanks to the easy-to-install feature on most CMS and the unlimited number of templates and extensions available out there, you can have a fully equipped website up and running in relatively no time. They can really be a life saver for many freelancers.

Plone and PHPNuke are some examples of popular CMS among the NGO community mainly because they can be installed and used very quickly.

Versatile – customizable

Some NGOs are news oriented, others’ main core is fundraising, some are rather dedicated to education and awareness, and many of them would probably need of the above at once. Of course websites are expected to fulfill all these needs.

So the flexibility of a CMS lies on the many modules, plugins, extensions, components you can switch on and off.

Let’s take for instance Joomla: you can turn it into a multi-language site by just using a component called Joomfish, that gives you the structure to easily manage all content in more than one language.
This specially becomes handy when you’re an international NGO constantly publishing news and articles.

Drupal on the other hand can turn an NGO website into the ultimate networking tool.

Easy to manage

The most wonderful feature of a CMS is its friendly usability. It allows people to create, edit and publish content with little effort and more importantly, no knowledge whatsoever of web programming.

They usually come with a dashboard or administrator panel that is very visual and intuitive, where content and media are arranged and organised for the sake of user’s mental health, by making things work smoothly and much simpler.

This is why a CMS becomes the perfect tool for many NGOs. Well, in a very general way at least.

So if you freelancers ever have an NGO for a client, keep in mind they’ll probably be interested in a plug and play product, and definitely in learning how to run it on their own.

What else can you say about Content Management Systems?