I work for a nonprofit Christian organization and we are looking to finally use computers!! I am trying to find a database program that will work for us. I have downloaded and sample Charity Director and it would be perfect .... if......
1) We could add or change fields as needed.
2) We could also keep track of the number of bags of groceries per household that we gave.
3) We could keep track of the number of peices of clothing per person we gave.
Does anyone know of a program like that???
Thanks in advance for your assistance and God Bless!

The best database solutions are usually ones that are custom-made for your organization. I know because I am responsible for data management and research at a non-profit.

Here are my suggestions to you.
1. Learn a little bit about relational databases. Basically, you want to learn about:
tables, relationships, fields, records, forms, queries and reports
I found the book, "Database design for Mere Mortals to be pretty helpful." What may be even more helpful is to take a Microsoft Access class at a local community college or training center.
2. Use Microsoft Access. This is a very good database system for beginners because you can design your database structure, menues, queries and reports with one software package, and it is a desktop database (as opposed to a client/server system). MS Access is designed to do things like you want to do (make small, customized databases).
3. Plan exactly what you want your database to do. Planning (or lack of) is what often makes or breaks the usefulness of a db.
4. You can also pay someone to make a db for you. However, this can be very expensive. Even a simple db can cost a few thousand dollars when you pay someone else to do it.


Here are my responses to your statements:
1) We could add or change fields as needed.
- It is usually not a good idea to change the fields that you have after the db is in use. Generally, you want to plan what information you want to record as part of the database design.
2) We could also keep track of the number of bags of groceries per household that we gave.
- Sure, this seems to be pretty easy. You would have a table for the households and a related table for grocery give-aways. You could run reports to see how many groceries each household got, and you could run aggregate reports to see the total groceries distributed, average distributions per household and etc . . .
3) We could keep track of the number of peices of clothing per person we gave.
-Same as above.
Does anyone know of a program like that???
-I do not know of any software that does exactly what you are looking for, but that does not meen that it doesn't exist. I would reccomend MS Access because you can customize it to do what you want.

Thanks in advance for your assistance and God Bless!
- You're welcome, and may God Bless your work.

You can email me or PM if you would like some more specific help. If your needs are simple enough, I may be able to help you put something together.

Don't know if that helps but there's a list of "similar" software and 3-4 of them are free at:

http://directory.google.com/Top/Soci...Software/?il=1

Hope This Helps