Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

In honor of the webinar that is happening in a couple of weeks, I figured I’d talk a bit about CiviCRM. CiviCRM is a nonprofit-focused open source tool, centered around membership, fundraising, events and such.

CiviCRM was one of the first (of a now growing number) of nonprofit-focused open source tools. It originally came out of the idea of making moving eBase (the CRM based on Filemaker Pro) to the web.

CiviCRM has 4 basic components: CiviContribute, CiviMail, CiviMember, and CiviEvents  - which allow you to track contacts, donations, members, send out email blasts, have event registration, etc. There is even a new case management feature in 2.0, which can be useful for organizations that need that functionality.

CiviCRM is a great CRM for small-to-medium sized organizations that need CRM functionality. In order to insure email deliverability on blasts, you’ll need to have it hosted somewhere where they are actively dealing with whitelists, etc. Otherwise, it’s easy to host it on a generic hosting account, if you don’t need that functionality. It can integrate with both Drupal or Joomla, and there is a new stand-alone version as well. Drupal integration is better, but there is a lot of active development going into improving the Joomla integration.

CiviCRM ranked #1 in satisfaction in the recent NTEN CRM satisfaction survey.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 11:10 am and is filed under Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.