TJ Cook from HiDef Web Solutions, Brian Hiatt from CivicPixel, and Wes Morgan, a key CiviCRM contributor presented CiviCRM at the Camp. CiviCRM is CRM system focused on nonprofits that can stand alone, work with Joomla, or with Drupal. CiviCRM is a complex package with a footprint larger than Drupal Core itself. This session gave participants a taste of what CiviCRM is all about. These are my notes from the session.

CiviCRM is Drupal's Power Module for Non-Profits to manage membership, organize events, solicit contributions, send email campaigns, and--most recently--shepherding grant making and pledge management.

What is CiviCRM?

• It is a Constituent Relationship Management package
• It provides a unified view of every constituent regardless of how they interact with your nonprofit
• It embraces the open source community strongly
• It is focused on the civic sector
• It provides for relatively seamless integrations with Drupal
• It has been internationalized
• It is free

CiviCRMs Components

• CiviMember
  • Members can sign up
  • Recurring memberships can be automated
• CiviEvent
  • Set up events
  • Charge for events or not using a variety of different payment schemes including Paypal and Authorize.net
• CiviContribute
  • Allow for contributions to your nonprofit
• CiviMail
  • Mail eBlast Solution
  • A "ConstantContact" replacement
  • Allows for tracking of email campaign metrics
• Grant and Pledge
  • Create Grant Applications
  • Accept Grant Requests
  • Manage Grant Process

What's New in the Latest Version?

• Tell a friend
  • Send something that you care about to others you know
• Campaign widget
  • A fundraising tool for example
• It allows for payment by check
• I includes a case management system
• Civigrant has been added--it is young and not fully featured, but will likely become mature
• A Custom Search feature has been integrated

Is it right for my client?

When organizations run home grown solutions they often find themselves with many members and the system becomes unworkable. When an organization looks for a solution, they find that most CRMs are specifically for sales rather than nonprofit management. Then someone realised how important it could be to nonprofits. Grassroots support is structured around people--people are the core to a nonprofit's success.

The Public Interest Network (PIN) had an interesting challenge of looking at aggregate information for all affiliate orgs. Each affiliate ONLY should see their own data. The data needed to be separate and also combined. The organization looked at Salesforce.com -- They have a nonprofit version. The nonprofit instance is totally hosted and allows you to import data in and out. Smaller nonprofits can use for free, larger can pay for it. The free version can only be used by 501(c)3 -- not any other of the 501(c) designations. PIN looked at Blackbaud and determined it didn't fit the organization's needed. While it was close, eCRM is written in .net and expensive.

PIN then started looking at opensource solution. The explored SugarCRM which has a free opensource solution, but to get the more flexible solution along with plugins required a more closed code base and a subscription. PIN looked at MPower but balked because it was Microsoft based and while it purported to be opensource, they felt that it really wasn't. Despite these analysis, PIN found that they were all good for what they do but the desire for opensource was key to the solution they were looking for. PIN is using the opportunity to make changes to the project and contribute back to the community.

CiviCRM got PIN 90% of the way for their needs. While it was not quite what they were looking for, it was close and the clincher was its being opensource. They liked that it is a contact-centric solution and that all information circles around the central contact.

PIN warned that CiviMail is the toughest aspect of Civi to setup -- the return path is very confusing. CiviSMTP can help with this.

They strongly recommended that a nonprofit use a different SMTP server for the blasts than regular email to avoid problems blacklist problems

The Strengths of CiviCRM include:

• It is the most Drupal compatible fully featured CRM available
• Installation similar to a typical Drupal Module
• There is fast reliable support via the Civi forums and IRC #civicrm
• The program exposes major elements in a Drupal friendly way
• There are finely grained permissions control and you can also use Drupal permissioning
• CiviCRM has good API documentation for more advanced implementations

Weakness

• Not quite as easy to set up as other modules and it is best to use a separate database
• Interface only works with a liquid layout -- it is wide and doesn't play nicely with a fixed width
• Data is stored in separate tables outside the Drupal standard node system. This places the data largely unavailable to Views and CCK. This makes it harder to use. However, Views 2 can access it making for greater flexibility in the future.
• CiviCRM uses Smarty not PHPTemplate -- if you are using PHPTemplate, you need to support two templating systems.
• No good and easy way to implement reporting -- Information isn't readily available without custom code and queries. You can search and save custom searches, but it is simple and basic
• No strong local support -- no camps etc.
• If you set up an account in CiviCRM it does not set up in Drupal. If you set up an account in Drupal it creates an account in CiviCRM for you.

The presentation was helpful for groups not familiar with CiviCRM. It gave an excellent overview of the system and answered many questions. I enjoyed participating and appreciated the time the presenters put into preparing.