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GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS

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Mark Cridge

End-User and Admin

Green Party of England & Wales

http://www.greenparty.org.uk

We use CiviCRM for our Membership and Supporters system. We're committed to using Open Source solutions and are keen to expand the variety and success of our member recruitment and fundraising efforts.

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Peter Petrik

Implementor, Developer

Skvare, LLC

http://skvare.com

Helping non-profits, membership organizations, and professional associations to make the most out of their resources with open-source tools.

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Xavier Dutoit

Developer and Implementor

Tech to the People

http://techtothepeople.com

Over the past 15 years I've been involved in several open source communities.
CiviCRM is without any doubt the one that has the strongest focus in welcoming "newbies" and letting everyone feel at home here. Another impressive feature is the focus on shipping. No matter what you think of CiviCRM today, you are almost sure that there will be a newer and better version in a few months.

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Lisa Hubbert

94110

Creative Arts Charter School, SFArtsED

http://www.sfartsedsummer.org

Online donations, class registration, school tour registration, online enrollment applications, volunteer hour tracking, organization directories

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Jamie McClelland

DEVELOPER AND IMPLEMENTER

PROGRESSIVE TECHNOLOGY PROJECT

http://progressivetech.org
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Pablo Campo

Administrator, Developer

End-user

http://www.es.amnesty.org

We are going to use it as central database to arrange many other sources in an only point and to use for several purposes as Press database, etc.

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David Greenberg

Core Team Member

CiviCRM

http://civicrm.org

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.

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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.

GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
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Carlos Capote Pérez-Andreu

Administrator, Developer

Amnistía Internacional España

http://www.es.amnesty.org

CiviCRM helps us to unify the management of different databases (volunteers, members, etc) allowing us to keep control over our data.

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Lynna Landstreet

Web developer

Freeform Solutions

http://www.freeform.ca

Freeform Solutions uses CiviCRM to help the non-profit organizations we develop sites for to manage information about their members, volunteers, activists, donors, employees and other contacts, and to handle donations, correspondence, mailings and more. We support the CiviCRM community by contributing documentation, patches, modules and code, and are a silver sponsor of CiviCon 2013.

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Robin Tombs

Supporter

Zing

http://www.zing.uk.com

Zing is a user of Civi software.
Zing wants to see more NFPs use Civi software.
Zing is helping fund further Civi software development and outreach.

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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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Wake-up Call for Site Administrators - Consolidated Cron Hits the Pavement in 4.1

Submitted by Dave Greenberg on January 22, 2012 - 17:37

Thanks to a successful Make-it-Happen campaign the 4.1 release comes with a much improved and super flexible approach for running Civi's critical back-ground processing tasks. These tasks include keeping membership statuses up to date and sending renewal reminders, sending scheduled CiviMail mailings, sending pledge payment reminders, and more. I've spent the past 10 days testing and documenting the new "consolidated cron" functionality, and the good news is that I think it fulfills the promise of providing a convenient and friendly way to administer and run all the required tasks for a site.

 

The "bad" news is that these improvements are NOT backward compatible. The set of PHP scripts which were previously used to run these tasks have all been deprecated (and moved to a 'deprecated' directory). This means that all CiviCRM-related cron jobs will stop working as soon as any site is upgraded to 4.1. (Yes, a loud warning will appear on the screen at the end of the upgrade process.)

 

Although you'll still have the option of configuring separate cron jobs to trigger each of these tasks - many of you will want to take advantage of the ability to use the new administrative interface to enable the jobs you need, and configure run frequency for each job. Then you can configure a single "master" cron task to trigger ALL enabled CiviCRM jobs whose next run is due. For example, you may want to run the CiviMail mailing scheduler every time your master cron task runs (which might be once a minute). However, you only want the Address geocoder job to run once a day. You can enable both jobs, and set the run frequency for the mailing scheduler to "Every time cron job is run", while setting the frequency for the Address geocoded to "Daily".

 

You can also use the Scheduled Jobs interface to run specific jobs on an ad hoc basis. For example, you probably only need to run the "Set Renewal Reminder Dates" after making changes to the renewal reminder settings for a membership type. Although you can do this from the command-line, it's probably easier to just navigate to Administer > System Settings > Scheduled Jobs and click "Execute Now" for that job.

 

So … in the interest of helping us make sure things are working properly in YOUR environment, and helping you prepare for the upgrade I strongly encourage you to do a test upgrade on a copy of your site. You can then walk through the process of evaluating the new options for running scheduled jobs and configuring your cron task(s). If you hit any issues during testing, please post a detailed report to the 4.1 testing forum board.

 

Take some time to review the detailed list of the available Scheduled Jobs and the syntax for running all jobs OR a specific job. The documentation covers both the PHP CLI method, as well as the URL method (invoked using 'wget' or 'curl').

 

SAFETY TIP - Several of the scheduled jobs which you may be using in production involve sending email to your constituents. Obviously you want to ensure that this does NOT happen from you test site. You can ensure that NO emails are actually sent from any CiviCRM site by adding the following line to your civicrm.settings.php file:

 

define( 'CIVICRM_MAIL_LOG', 1 );

 

Kudos to Eileen McNaughton for pushing and prodding this much needed improvement along, to everyone who contributed to the MIH, and to Eileen, Jamie McClelland, Tim Otten, Xavier Dutoit and Michal Mach for the hard work and creative thinking that went into the design and implementation.

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GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS

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