For many, either being part of something bigger than ourselves or standing up for closely held principles are important. In June 2019, Crust Technology contributed all of its software intellectual property to the Commons Conservancy, an independent open-source foundation. In doing so, we created Corteza, “The Digital Work Platform for Humanity”.

Corteza

The objective of Corteza is clear – to deliver a 100% free, open-source, self-hosted cloud platform for growing your organisation’s productivity. It enables relationships and protects the work and the privacy of all those concerned.

This effort began by producing a fully-featured alternative to Salesforce – the cloud leader in CRM – and an alternative to Slack Enterprise Messaging. All of this is presented via a unified interface on the frontend, joined up with automation on the backend. Very recently, we also released Service Solution, a self-hosted enterprise-grade alternative to Salesforce and Oracle Service Clouds.

Everything is delivered with modern, hyper-efficient code. Organisations can benefit from the impressive low-code development facilities to build their own custom apps, reducing costs and lowering time to delivery.

The publicly stated values of the Corteza project are as follows:

Public Good:

Corteza’s software and other offerings are designed and provided as a public good for the public benefit.

Open and Transparent:

Corteza’s governance and operations are open and transparent. It uses the best practices from across the not-for-profit, private and public sectors.

Diverse and Inclusive:

Corteza’s members, policies and programmes are designed to actively foster diverse, inclusive and non-discriminatory participation.

Built for Humanity:

Corteza’s software and other offerings have a real impact on people’s lives. As such, they are designed, built and provided with a strong emphasis on quality, privacy, security and usability.

Crust for the Not-for-profit sector

All Crust software is built 100% on the Corteza code-base. Professional versions of Crust software are made freely available to the not-for-profit sector, including all professional software maintenance.

On top of this, Crust is beginning to push development of Corteza’s outreach Programmes, which range from Humanitarian through Ecological to Privacy Programmes.

Delivering a standards-based public good, then constantly striving to push those standards higher is a lot of work. Being part of something bigger than us is key to the Crust team’s identity and to our brand. Since the launch of Corteza, we discovered that the more we give and the better we give, the stronger our business gets.

The Not-for-Profit sector deserves an approach to building software that is inclusive of its requirements and which ensures organisations in the sector do not fall out-of-step with developments in the private and public sectors. Crust and Corteza successfully deliver this approach, feature-rich and with ever-reducing economic barriers to entry and participation. Our low-code philosophy is central to this ethos and we go out of our way to ensure that, where coding is required, it’s limited to well-supported and inexpensive JavaScript skills.

The cherry on the cake? Crust Essential Support subscriptions are completely free-of-charge for Not-for-Profit organisations and their customer bases – subject to the condition that the organisation is fulfilling its purpose by using our software. Digitally transforming and managing your relationships with your donors, advocates and volunteers have never been easier.

Try out Crust

Are you working in a Not-for-Profit organisation? Get your free online Crust demo here.