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My experience with Orchid For Change thus far has been extremely good.

I have been working with a county Democratic Party in Ohio. We have been using Orchid's interface to build an Internet presence for several months now.
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Orchid provided me with a default site. The content that was available wasn't necessarily what I wanted, but it gave me a direction in which I could focus my energies, a logical framework upon which I could build the local county's site. For this political newbie, this has been the equivalent of "training wheels" on one's first bicycle.

In addition, Orchid has given me the option of dynamically adding content to my website without any work on my part. This is very important for two reasons.

First, our site is updated with news articles automatically until I change them again. Nobody's paying me to do this work, and I am working with a dial-up-consigned-to-electronic-hell 56K-modem rather than a fast Internet connection, so the less time I spend working on the site, the happier I am. If they reduce the amount of time that I spend on it and it looks really good, even better!

Second, the fact that my chosen settings will allow the site to be updated frequently means that people will have an incentive to visit the site more often. In Ohio's case, this auto-updating for my site has meant that the latest news about the Tom Noe scandal (the Republicans have misplaced $10-$12 million -- and counting -- and it may have gone into the Bush 2004 war chest!) has been continuously posted to our homepage.

This, obviously, is not a bad thing at all since a site that is visited only once and forgotten is useless for public relations!

The quality of support that I've gotten from Orchid has been extremely good so far. I've submitted emails to their support@ email address and received responses at 10:45 P.M. EDT Friday night, and I've gotten several responses on weekends and holidays. These
people work hard. In my 10 years working in the software industry, this is probably the best support I've had.

We are still early in the development lifecycle of our website, but already I've used Orchid's system to advertise neighboring-county activities on our own site, thus (hopefully) encouraging their success as well as our own while also building links between their organizations and ours. It is my understanding that the State Democratic party in Ohio has paid a lump sum to Orchid so that their counties can get sites cheaply. If any other states are considering this, I would strongly urge them to do so, as it has the potential to drastically affect one's grassroots by facilitating communication between them.

I have not yet begun to explore all of the options that Orchid offers us, but based on my experience to this point, I'm very happy with their product and their support, and gladly recommend that others use Orchid for their site hosting.