As promised, here are five new services designed primarily for associations, made possible thanks to your financial support and encouragement. This article introduces these new services and their main features.
La Contre-Voie is putting its technical skills to good use: we’re launching a new set of tools designed for teamwork, based on the needs we’ve identified among a small number of structures.
Although these services have been designed to meet the needs of associations / nonprofits, they can also be subscribed to by companies, local authorities and private individuals if they meet their expectations.
Find below a detailed list of these new tools, followed by a short making-of on the creation of this offer!
We now offer website hosting using WordPress, an open-source software that helps you design websites without writing a single line of code!
The first level, at 5 GB of space, should be more than enough to host a medium-sized website.
Under the hood: the free software Garage, based on the S3 protocol, which duplicates in real time all the websites we host on at least three different servers!
Finally, for those who don’t like WordPress and prefer the command line or other approaches, we offer static website hosting under the same conditions as WordPress website hosting.
Finally, we offer a dedicated Nextcloud installation for organizations.
Nextcloud is a software suite that works like the Google Suite, with many integrated tools: shared files, form creation, calendar, collaborative editing of Office documents… The difference is that the data is hosted on our servers and we promise not to make any commercial use of it 🙂
There’s no limit to the number of users who can be added to Nextcloud, but we do limit disk space: from 20 GB, and up to 500 GB for the moment - we’ll advise if there’s a need to go beyond 500 GB for certain organizations.
This new service allows you to send mass emails, up to several thousand recipients per month - again, we’re starting slowly, so the highest sending limit is only up to 5,000 emails per month. We hope to increase this limit over time!
We’re using the free software Listmonk to run this service, on a server we’ve dedicated entirely to it.
We’ve launched our PeerTube to host our conference replays, and at the same time we’re letting other people upload their videos!
We offer a fairly large entry-level quota for video hosting, as this is a rather greedy format: from 20 GB up to 1 TB.
We can even host a dedicated PeerTube installation for those who wish to do so.
Finally, our Accounting service enables associations to carry out their accounting formalities (including the generation of balance sheets and income statements) in compliance with the French associative/non-profit chart of accounts, without any headaches.
This service is based on the open-source software Paheko, which we’ve been using in-house at La Contre-Voie since 2019!
Finally, as an option, it is possible to request newsletter service integration in Paheko to send subscription reminders and more easily manage the contact base used for mass mailings.
We don’t have the resources of Google, which offers its software suite free of charge - at the cost of our privacy - for associations and billions of other people.
Nor do we have the resources of Framasoft, which operates thanks to numerous donations and can offer the excellent Framaspace free of charge to over 2,000 associations, with a team of 10 employees.
We’re still struggling to pay the people who maintain these digital services for you, and to get the subsidies we’d like - not least because of the lack of budget allocated to public services.
We are also finding it difficult to pay for our popular education activities, and to take the step from an association that was initially 100% volunteer.
We have therefore decided that these new services, which we call “à la carte” services, will be subject to an annual subscription, the rates for which can be consulted on the page for each of these services.
And to avoid falling into the trap of capitalism, we have chosen to offer extensive solidarity-based rates for structures that express a need for them.
We’ve tried to find fair prices to pay for the upkeep of these services and the people who maintain them.
And yet, for many associations, especially those with annual budgets of less than €2,000, these rates can be particularly high, and incomparable to those of the digital giants…
We don’t want a structure’s financial capacity to be an obstacle to the adoption of free services; that’s why, if a structure contacts us explaining that its budget doesn’t allow it to finance the services we offer, we’ll adapt our rates to suit its means.
We rely on donations to make up the difference between the cost of the services and the actual price paid by the facility.
For the moment, we’ve prioritized the launch of services for organizations, as this has been a gap to fill in our service offering since the association was created.
That said, as we announced, we won’t be abandoning our subscription-based and members-only services: we’re already planning to add a few new features as soon as we’re no longer caught up in the rush of the launch.
Finally, La Contre-Voie is officially launching its support program, designed to help associations with their digital transition, because providing services is not always enough if the structures using them are not trained in their use and guided in changing their habits.
The program includes on-demand training sessions on specific open-source software, data migration assistance and long-term support.
Read a testimonial from a successful digital support with a nonprofit in this article! More information to come, but if you’re interested in this program, feel free to contact us.
A behind-the-scenes look at the development of this new service offering, which was made possible thanks to you:
It’s the culmination of several years’ work, which took place in different stages:
Thank you for following and supporting us in the creation of these services!
Please don’t hesitate to pass on the information to other groups who might need one of our services. We’ll be delighted to give them all the advice and support they need.
See you soon!