Membership. Blog. Photos. Groups. Recruiting. Fundraising.
About Rostr
Rostr is written and maintained by Jeremy Tunnell, a 2005 computer engineering graduate. It is the result of the needs of a (now) 10,000 member nonprofit student organization called Students for Saving Social Security. During the summer of 2005, Rostr began simply as a way to keep a centralized list of members. Of course, as soon as there was a centralized list of members, they had to be contacted on a regular basis. Then the website needed updating, pictures uploaded and displayed, blog posts written, members grouped...you get the picture.
Design Philosophy
Nowadays, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different CMS (Content Management Systems), AMS (Association Management Systems), mailing list managers, and other software packages out there designed to help small groups and nonprofits manage their organizations. And yet many of these groups still use Excel spreadsheets to keep track of their members and send email by copy-paste into outlook.
Roster is designed to be a low cost, easy to use platform that simplifies every aspect of a small association or club. It delivers the bulk of the features needed by most groups...without weighting itself down.
Rostr Includes...
- Membership Management - Rostr keeps track of your members: where they live, what chapter they are a member of, and what groups you have assigned them to. A decent php programmer can add any criteria that you like.
You can also tag information to specific groups. For instance if you have a group called "summer interns", you could include where their internship is...just for members in that group. - Mailing List Management - With Rostr, sending emails to your members is easy. The mailroom module allows you to create HTML or plaintext emails (or both) and send them to any group of members you like. It keeps track of who received each email and which mails bounced back, so you can filter your lists for bad addresses. Rostr uses your servers integrated mail() function or a SMTP server of your choice.
- Donor Management - Keeping track of donors, when they donated, and how much is easy. Rostr contains an integrated donor database, with mail-merge export capabilities.
- Content Management - Keep your website up to date with basic Content Management capabilities.
- Blogging - Rostr contains full-featured blog software similar to Wordpress. No need for another login!
- Photo Gallery - Like Gallery, Rostr allows your staff or membership to upload pictures into photo galleries. Photos are automatically resized (3 sizes), and you can show the photo gallery publically on your website.
- File Storage - Upload and share important files with your members. Rostr eliminates the need to teach your members how to use FTP to upload files to share. Just point Rostr to the file and everything else is taken care of!