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It's the first day of my first Nonprofit Technology Conference (put on by NTEN) experience. I must say, I like the vibe. Sure, it's a wee disorganized, and there's plenty of salesmanship going on, but there's also an overarching sense of camaraderie and purpose to what it's all about. 

Here are three things I'm mulling over as I've had a few minutes to start soaking it all in. Mull with me.

Drupal and CiviCRM, the leading open source content management system and constituent relationship management system, can be a powerful combination to help your organization connect to, empower, and organize your constituents. We have a lot of experience with integrating Drupal and CiviCRM and have learned a lot about the benefits and hurdles you’ll encounter when choosing such a solution.

Following on the heels of T.J.'s post about Ned's experience using CiviContribute and CiviEvent, I accepted the challenge of putting together a mockup for a new default look for the first page of a CiviContribute contribution page. I had a lot of fun with this and think it'll be a great first step toward improving an already wonderful free and open source tool for nonprofits.

In this screencast I walk through specific usability changes and reasons why I'm proposing them. There are notes posted after the video as well (thanks for those, T.J.). Enjoy!

As detailed in last week's post, the first in our Drupal + CiviCRM series, we showed how in Drupal and CiviCRM we have two of the most powerful free open source software packages available to nonprofits. With an astonishing feature set right out of the box, both tools give almost infinite power to those who develop websites and systems with them--for FREE. Be sure to poke around their websites first and bop back here to read on if you're unfamiliar with either tool.

In the past year the team at HiDef has worked on quite a few projects that involved Drupal and CiviCRM. Our experience with the tools (the good, the bad, and the ugly) has prompted us to do a four-post series here about how they work and how they'll improve moving forward. We think the series will be beneficial for nonprofits, for developers, and for ourselves.