I am working for an NGO in a developing country that takes online registrations of volunteers but in the format of an emailed word document. We would like to have some kind of online program linked to our website that the volunteers can enter the data into and then the relevant data (date of birth, country, project of interest etc) of all the volunteers is compiled into a spreadsheet. As IT support at our foundation is non-existant I would love to know if such a program exists or whether we should stick to manually entering data?

Using a open source content management system like Joomla (http://www.joomla.org/) to run your site would let you add this function for free as an extension (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/contacts-and-feedback/forms). Joomla is free to use however some of the extensions are not available without paying the developer, though there is usually a free solution available for every task. The Community builder extension works well with groups and organisations.