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.

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.

We help many not for profits implement CiviCRM through consultancy, training, configuration and custom development. Many of them come from a painful world of old Access databases, multiple spreadsheets and even paper. It's really satisfying to
help people move on with a system that's so much in tune with their own ethics of sharing and collaboration. We also 'eat our own dog food' and use Civi in-house for our client records because we love the flexibility and control it gives us.

For us it's important to share code and advice with other members of the community when we can because we know we get it back in help at other times. The community really is awesome and one of the friendliest and undaunting I've come across. We appreciate the huge value of the software to us and our clients so we try to contribute back and make it even better.

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.

I find the engagement with our community of users to be intellectually stimulating
and rewarding. Seeing folks with expertise in a particular area step up and contribute their time and ideas to help improve the product is quite exciting. Every time I hear about a new interesting organization starting to use CiviCRM, I get a renewed sense of excitement about our work. The range of civic sector organizations currently using the software is quite amazing to me - from large international advocacy organizations to local performing arts troupes. I also really enjoy interacting with our international community - building friendships and getting to share culture (food, music, humor ....) with colleagues on every continent.