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Welcome to Southern Forge

We help progressive non-profit organizations find and implement online tools that allow them to serve their mission in a more effective way.

SF offers a large range of services, from websites (both new development and feature upgrades) to tools such as CRMs, Wikis, Blogs, etc. We build most of our solutions on open source software but we also implement commercial software such as Salesforce.com.

We are based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Website Development

Whether you are looking to build a new site from scratch, or relaunch an existing site with new design and features, we can help you. We have experience building sites on a variety of open source content management systems (CMS) such as Drupal, Joomla, and Contenido. We also implement blogging tools (e.g. Wordpress) and Wikis.

All of these tools allow you a large degree of control over your content. After an initial training period, you will be able to maintain your website yourself, without the constant help of a programmer.

Using open source instead of commercial solutions reduces the cost of development (no license fees) and ensures that you are not locked into SF as a service provider. The volunteer communities of programmers who maintain these tools are huge, hence there are many providers available who can help you fix problems or upgrade your website. Finally, open source systems have features at least as powerful as commercial systems, in many cases outperforming those, and thousands of organizations worldwide use them.

Constituency Relationship Management Systems (CRM)

You know how important it is for you to keep track of your organizations interactions with its stakeholders, be they your activists, your donors, or colleagues within your network. How many times has it happened to you that a crucial staff member left your organization and there was no time for a proper handover? A communication officer who took all his contacts with him? CRMs help track and organize all your institutional communication (emails, phonecalls, letters, meetings) in one central place, so no information is ever lost again.

We implement CiviCRM (an open source system) and Salesforce.com (a powerful commercial system available free of charge to registered charities).

Online donations

Every year more donors give online; it is convenient, fast and if implemented correctly, secure. We can help you add online donation capacity to your website (from basic hosted forms (e.g. PayPal) to systems fully integrated payment gateway solutions (e.g. Cybersource). We also train you to use fraud detection tools, and develop secure policies for your online giving, and offer to integrate shop systems so you can sell merchandise online.

Email Newsletter Delivery Platforms

You have a small email list of your constituency and want to grow it, but are not sure how? You are worried about your monthly email newsletter getting caught in your recipients' spam filters? You are not sure how successful your email communication is and need to track its efficiency? We can help you either implement a mail delivery system on your own servers (e.g. CiviCRM/CiviMail), or implement a hosted tool from the multitude of options and configure it for your needs, including tracking that will show you what works and what doesn't.

Google AdSense Campaigns / Google Statistics

You don't have enough traffic visiting your website? We can help you develop a Google AdSense advertising campaign, so that your constituency discovers your site more easily when searching for related topics on Google. We guide you on how to design landing pages that will capture visitors and motivate them to explore your site. If you are a registered NGO, we can help you apply for a Google Advertising Grant, giving you several thousand US$ worth of free advertising each month.

Finally, we can setup Google Tracking for your website, so you get the complete picture on where visitors go on your site, how long they stay, which pages work and which don't. You'll know where your visitors come from geographically, and even where they go after they leave yoursite. We also implement similar tools that run on your own servers.

eLearning Systems

You are a teaching institution and need to offer a course online? We implement eLearning systems based on the world leading open source platform moodle.