For cause-driven organizations, a website is a place to highlight impact, share resources, and build support. While a blog or brochure site can achieve some of these goals, it rarely does it all. Unfortunately, we all too often find organizations confined by the free and low-cost online platforms accessible to them. With that in mind, we’ve built OpenAid. It’s a free and open-source website starter kit developed for nonprofits and grassroots organizations. Its feature set is robust, its architecture flexible, and it can be installed in minutes.

We worked with activists, community organizers, and aid workers to build a platform that serves their organizations’ needs. Here are some of the features we’ve built to allow groups to inspire and connect with others on a scale that truly reflects their impact in the world.

• Project mapping. Each project or program you add to the site is displayed on dynamic maps, allowing users to see the full scope of your work. Because OpenAid is flexible, you can easily adjust a project to instead be a city or chapter and still take advantage of all of the mapping features.
• Blog and news. There are subtle but important differences between a News section and a blog, so we decided to build both for ultimate flexibility. Associate authors with your posts to create dynamic profile pages and allow users to track their favorite writer’s work. Reference a project with a post and it will display on a project’s page, creating almost a mini website for that project.
• Resource library. Share the resources you’ve created with the rest of the world in an easy-to-find way. We’ve added metadata fields such as Resource Type and Topics and provided a filter set and search interface to allow users to quickly discover the tools and materials relevant to them, even if your library has grown to hundreds of documents.
• Image galleries. Pictures are key to telling your stories and connecting with your supporters. Associate a gallery with one or more projects to highlight events, volunteers, and initiatives specific to that project’s work.
• Beautiful, responsive design. Design is important and we want your website to look great regardless of device. A color picker allows you to easily adapt OpenAid to reflect your organization’s identity. We’ve also developed it with flexibility in mind so if you add new pages to the site or add fields to a content type, your site will retain that same great look and feel.

You can dig further into OpenAid’s feature set by spinning up a free sandbox site on Pantheon. Or download the distribution at https://drupal.org/project/openaid to install on any server. If you have further questions or would like assistance getting set up with OpenAid, feel free to reach out to me at openaid@atendesigngroup.com.