Operations for non-profits
This folder is for the person who keeps the site running: a staff member, a technical volunteer, a hosting company or a partner, and the director who is responsible in the end. Most of a website's cost and risk is not in building it, but in running it for years. A small, written routine with a name next to every task is what keeps a non-profit's site healthy.
Contents
The pages of this folder
| Page | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Low-budget hosting | Hosting models, what each costs in money and time, what to ask a host |
| SQLite and Velocity for small teams | The two choices that make a site cheap to run, and their limits |
| Donor and volunteer data protection | Where personal data lives, who sees it, how long you keep it |
| Backups and updates routine | The routine that prevents expensive failures |
| When volunteers leave | Accounts, content ownership and knowledge when people go |
| Working with a partner | Choosing and working with a partner; no non-profit pricing is published |
The compact version is Low-budget operations.
Who does what
| Task | Staff or trained volunteer | Technical volunteer, host or partner |
|---|---|---|
| Writing and publishing | Yes | |
| Processing forms and the newsletter | Yes | |
| Account reviews | Yes, with Check user accounts | |
| Backups | Checks they exist | Sets them up, tests restores |
| Updates of Exponential, extensions and PHP | Yes | |
| Server security | Yes | |
| Incidents | Notices and reports | Fixes |
Write the names into the Roles and permissions worksheet. The general split between owner, host and partner is described in Who does what.
The minimum routine
| How often | What | Page |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly | Forms answered; donations checked; spam removed | Processing volunteer applications |
| Monthly | Backups exist; updates checked; logs glanced at; accounts of leavers closed | Monthly checklist |
| Quarterly | Restore test; access review | Backups and updates routine |
| Yearly | Budget, partner and host review; statement and policies updated | Annual checklist |
When something goes wrong
- The site is down: When the site is down.
- An error page with a reference: When something goes wrong.
- A security problem in Exponential itself: report it privately (Private security reports).
- Write down what happened: Incident notes template.
- Small teams: Incident response for small teams.
Related pages
- Non-profits: start here
- Keeping the site healthy (Customers)
- Hosting companies: start here
- Free documentation: this page is free to copy, translate and improve under the GNU FDL 1.3.
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