GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS

GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
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Michael McAndrew

Implementor, Trainer, Documentator and Developer.

Third Sector Design

http://www.thirdsectordesign.org

CiviCRM helps us help non profits to do fantastic things with their data.
Being closely involved with the developers and documentation team on a daily basis ensures that we can give our clients the best and most up to date advice on how they can use CiviCRM to meet their needs.
GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
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Yashodha Chaku

CORE TEAM MEMBER

WEB ACCESS INDIA PVT. LTD.

http://webaccessglobal.com

Its great to work on a project that has a profound impact on non profits. I am very excited about the work we do on CiviCRM which involves building on each other's ideas to create best of breed solutions for non profits. The fact that CiviCRM is an open source project with an amazing community and dedicated developers is an icing on the cake.
GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
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Katy Jockelson

Implementor, administrator

Third Sector Design

http://thirdsectordesign.org

We work with non-profits to help them use and understand Civi. It's such an important tool for these organisations and it's great to see people using it in different and interesting ways. Using and working with Civi is made so much more fun and useful by the enthusiastic and talented community surrounding it.
GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
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Amy Bucaida

Administrator

Missouri Credit Union Association

http://www.mcua.org

We are a full CiviCRM install with Drupal.
GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
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Merlise Clyde

End-user, administrator

International Society of Bayesian Analysis

http://bayesian.org

ISBA is an international non-profit society with members from all over the world. We have sections that represent different scientific areas and chapters that represent different regions of the world. Civi Member powers our membership system! We use CiviEvent for Conference and Workship registration, and utilize CiviPetition for creating new sections to our society through member petitions. We are epxloring how CiviGrants can be used to track our travel awards and look forward to features for integrating accounting and finance. As a growing non-profit CiviCRM plays a major role in managing our membership system!
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Kellie Brownell

End-user

EFF

https://www.eff.org

The CiviCRM community has been a tremendous resource for new ideas and helping us solve problems. We are excited to contribute customizations EFF makes back to core and support new features such as batch entry for offline donations or multiple payment processors on one donation form.
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Donald Lobo

Implementor, Developer

CiviCRM LLC

http://civicrm.org

Still thinking of a deep deep quote. Basically:

It is super important for non-profits, advocacy and related groups to take charge of their destiny. Having control of your data is a good start. The crowd-sourced nature of an open source project in so in line with the co-operation and principles of most non-profits

CiviCRM is a project that strives to make the above possible. It is FREE as in kittens.
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Lisa Jervis

End-user, Administrator, Implementor

Center for Media Justice

http://www.centerformediajustice.org

Civi has been an amazing tool for CMJ (and for other organizations I work with) to keep our most important data all in one place in a user friendly way.
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Peter McAndrew

Implementor, Developer

Third Sector Design

http://www.thirdsectordesign.org

Being part of the CiviCRM community is really something to shout about! Not only is CiviCRM an amazing software package, its designed for organisations that make a difference in the world. We help non-profits across the UK gain control of their data through the power of CiviCRM.

It is without a doubt the best piece of software I've ever worked with, and I'm constantly discovering cool new features. More recently I've been working on CiviMobile as part of a project for my course at University. I'm really looking forward to seeing this being used by organisations across the globe.
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Ken West

End-user, Administrator

City Bible Forum

http://citybibleforum.org

City Bible Forum is an Australian not-for-profit Christian organisation. We need to communicate effectively with our constituents, and CiviCRM gives us a comprehensive set of tools for managing relationships. Interestingly, we often find that new features are being added just as our need for those features is becoming apparent. It's the right fit for us.
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Jon Goldberg

Implementor

Palante Technology Cooperative

http://palantetech.com

Palante Tech works with social justice organizations on a tight budget to be more effective through technology. CiviCRM allows us to provide a high-quality low-cost database for community organizing, donor and membership management.
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Coleman Watts

End-user and Developer

Woolman Sierra Friends Center

http://woolman.org

If it weren't for CiviCRM we'd be using at least 5 different
systems for Woolman: one for donor management, another for email newsletters, a third for our school enrollment, a fourth for our summer camp registration, and then a whole bunch of spreadsheets for keeping track of things like event attendance, prospective students, CSA memberships, etc. And of course none of those systems would talk to each other or make it possible to get a whole picture of the many ways one person might participate in our education center's activities. Migrating all of our scattered data and disparate systems to CiviCRM was a long and challenging process, but the results have been more than worth it. Our ability to track and report on our programs has improved dramatically, while the burden on staff to do data entry has been greatly reduced, and our participants are happy that they can now register/enroll online rather than mailing or faxing paper forms.

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Home » Blogs » grobot's blog

Melbourne Bootcamp review

Submitted by grobot on April 22, 2008 - 19:10

Sunday 20th and Monday 21st April was CiviCRM Bootcamp in Melbourne - an excellent couple of days of training, discussion, and discovery.

There was a diverse range of users (about ten?) and different use cases, with representatives from business, politics and charity spaces, and both large and small installations. This led into a comfortable and informal couple of days with two core CiviCRM devs - Dave G and Lobo. For me (approaching CiviCRM mostly from a developer/integrator perspective), it was really helpful to see the different ways in which people use the system to suit their particular needs.

Training sessions covered how CiviCRM works - the basic types of data stored in the system, special things like groups and smart groups, and how they work and are used, custom data groups and fields, and profiles. There was plenty of room for "how do I" and "I wish that" discussion as well, which led to lots of "oh, we do that by ..." tricks being shared between the various attendees. There was a lot of value in that aspect of the bootcamp alone.

In the workshops, I focussed more on development sessions, and enjoyed having access to core CiviCRM developers minds and skills while I explored how to achieve our various project goals. I started adding a UI to attach multiple contacts to a single activity (now CRM-3014).

In the dev workshops, we looked at CiviCRM's internal methodologies, the various external packages which CiviCRM leverages, and how they are applied in the system. We also looked at how some things are expected to change in 2.1.

Finally, there were a few demonstrations of what some non-core developers have been doing with CiviCRM.

Andrew Perry of Legal.Consult demonstrated CiviSMS functionality, which looks to be a useful tool. CiviSMS worked back in the early days of CiviCRM, but I hear it came dangerously close to being extinguished for lack of use before LC breathed new life into the component. Andrew also gave a very detailed and informed talk on how his customers have used CiviMail.

On the final day, I demonstrated a custom search we have built for our local membership secretaries to see members in their local area whose memberships have recently expired (or soon will). This gave other attendees a good look at one use for custom searches.

Going forward, I'm very excited to look deeper into a few new threads that the bootcamp opened up. One is improved logging via MySQL triggers, which will allow us to track data changes with much more (perhaps unlimited?) detail in the system. Another was the potential to override CiviCRM's CRM classes with custom ones, similarly to how CiviCRM allows template overrides. There were lots of other "oh wow" moments, which I'll add later as I review my notes!

Thanks very much to Catholic Super for hosting us - we appreciated their generous catering and great facilities in central Melbourne.

Comments

Submitted by philiphart on April 23, 2008 - 02:00

Thanks for the review, and indeed thanks to everyone for a great couple of days training, even if my head did hurt at the end of it. I learnt a lot about the structure of Civi and have a much better idea of the way forward for implementing Civi for our small voluntary organisation.

Having got home with time to think about it, I now wished I had asked a lot more about reporting. That's the one big remaining uncertainty for me. See you on the forums..

cheers
Phil.

Submitted by Ozyank on April 28, 2008 - 22:39
  • ...to Dave and Lobo for bringing CiviCRM to us and for bringing the training "down under"
  • to Diane and Clare for asking soooooooooo many questions,
    many of which I never would have thought to ask and, as a consequence,
    I learned so much more.
  • to all the others who presented something about their own
    implementation. It opened my eyes to more things the CiviCRM can do.
  • to the hosts, Catholic Super and to Rob who made us feel
    very comfortable. It's also nice to be able to park free in the
    Melbourne CBD!

I came as a user of CiviCRM and hoped to go away as a "power user". I
think I have a lot more ground to cover before I reach my goal but at
least the training gave me a road map and a push in the right direction.

The agenda was prepared with the goal of addressing the needs of our
own group of attendees. It worked and it was very flexibile too. Not
just a PowerPoint presentation...in fact...there was no PowerPoint
presentation!

Dennis Gray
Democrats Abroad
Tell an American to Vote!

Submitted by excell@drupal.org on April 23, 2008 - 06:25

Echo - thanks to Dave, lobo, the hosts and the the excellent mix of attendees.

The time spent over the last weekend was greatly beneficial as it helped to put a lot of jigzaw pieces together after much research of the software we will be using (CiviCRM) to replace the current Admin Database.

It was fabulous to meet with other developers and users and realise that we are not alone. Diverse Industries were represented from Financial Institutions, through Legal Professional Consultants, Political groups to Camps for Kids.

We did some practical exercises that tested out our understanding of the power and limitations and raised real life case issues, challenges that will need to be addressed along the way.

We received many excellent ideas to help progress the Association's individual needs.

Overall my report is:

* I am totally impressed with some of the current functionality and future plans of the software, that I previously did not know about.
* It was well worth taking the time to attend
* Clare & I were enabled to sketch out some roughs for what we need to do next in relation to migrating from old to new system - this would not have happened without the hands on and face to face time.

cheers!