In 2010, San Francisco Baykeeper was suffering from disparate fundraising and communication systems.

They were using:

We recently completed a project with San Francisco Baykeeper, a pollution watchdog in the Bay Area. They asked us to help them move from an expensive yearly contract with Blackbaud Raiser's Edge to the libre and "free kittens"* CiviCRM.

Never having worked directly with Raiser's Edge (RE), we relied on Eliet Henderson, Baykeeper Development Director, to help us get our head around all of their data. She exported the RE database as CSV files, grouped by Individuals and Organizations. Each grouping then had subgroups consisting of relationships, gifts, recurring contributions, notes, address information, etc. With all of the export files generated we began to configure CiviCRM and build the tools that would handle the import.

Here's what we were dealing with:

• 35: Number of custom fields
• 42: Number of CSV files
• ~19,000: Number of contribution records
• ~42,000: Combined columns in all CSV files
• ~123,000,000: Combined size (in bytes) of all CSV files

Based on Deepak's excellent blog post about adding discount codes, we decided to take it one step further and write a module. The CiviEvent Discount module has an admin interface to manage discount codes and the ability to link them to one or more events. Combined with the recent ability to access price sets from hook_civicrm_buildAmount the module also supports adding discount codes to events with price sets.

We just added the project to d.o. this morning, so the dev release may not show up until tomorrow. In addition, this was developed mostly as a prototype for a client we're currently working with so we haven't flushed out all the requirements (or bugs) yet.

Introduction: The Need

Progressive Technology Project (PTP) supports grassroots community organizing groups nationwide that engage in social, economic and environmental justice efforts to empower low-income people and communities of color. These groups conduct phone banking and field canvassing as an integral part of their base-building and voter engagement strategies to engage existing and new constituents. PTP hired DharmaTech to help them build PowerBase: a customized CiviCRM for use by community organizing groups.

PowerBase helps groups manage the following data related to phonebanking and field canvassing work:

• voter info, history, and demographics
• reason why the phonebank or canvass is taking place
• responses to questions asked during the phonebank or canvass
• phonebank or canvass status
• primary language spoken

About 8 weeks ago we began looking into a CiviCRM / QuickBooks integration framework. Our goal is to write a module that allows CiviCRM contributions and contact information to be written to QuickBooks. Our target version is QuickBooks 2009 Premier Non-Profit edition, since that's what we use.

At the very least, the module should be able to:

1. Map sources of income in CiviCRM with accounts in QuickBooks.
2. Insert Donations, Deposits and Payments from CivCRM to QuickBooks.
3. A seamless process that requires little management from the staff.

Current CiviCRM architecture pitfalls

rasantiago has proposed a new CiviCRM architecture with details of the ORM layer. Torenware commented on the latter and mentioned some particular scalability issues.  Our own experience with the Active Record design pattern proposed by rasantiago is that it works well for small projects but doesn't scale well.  We believe that CiviCRM is now facing serious scaling problems in several areas, to wit:

The current way to track Households (HH) in CiviCRM is not easy. Over the last few weeks DharmaTech has been brainstorming how to better manage HH's and we had a chance at the CiviCRM developer camp to bounce ideas off of the core team as well as other developers in the community which was really helpful. What follows are our ideas to start the discussion.