Developer and End-user
Fuzion
CiviCRM has one of the most active and friendliest communities I have come across. From initial tentative forum posts I was encouraged into engaging more actively through IRC and directly with other groups & individuals and am now happy to count many community members as friends. I recently found an article on the web that said if you post a question about CiviCRM anywhere on the web Lobo will post an answer within a few hours. It often feels like that is true.
One of the most valuable way in which the community supports me is by allowing me to bounce my ideas around and often someone is able to suggest an approach which is better than mine.
Implementor, Trainer, Documentator and Developer.
Third Sector Design
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.
Ally, FanBoy
Aspiration
By giving the nonprofit sector a values-driven, free/open source solution for CRM needs!
End-user
EFF
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.
Implementer, Developer
EE-atWork
The CiviCRM community is a very friendly and helpful community. Whatever the challenge, I always get enough help from the forum or IRC to nudge me in the right direction. For me joining in a CiviCRM sprint once or twice a year is the best, meeting other community members in real life, sharing successes, challenges, problems and meals :-) Seriously, I think the active community is one of the serious assets of CiviCRM and I am proud to be part of it! And when I grow up I promise to do more :-)
Core Team Member, Developer, Implementor
CiviCRM, Caltha
I've always been passionate about what non-profits and advocacy groups can achieve using technology. For me, CiviCRM shows an essential example of how non-profit and technology worlds can come together to provide real change - working as community, creating value for yourself, but also for others in non-profit sector.
Consultant
Circle Interactive
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.
Administrator and End-user
CiviCRM is a powerful tool that could be really useful for many non-profits in Mexico.
Unfortunately the community is very small in my country. I hope that in the next years the community expands around Latin America.
Implementor
ISHR
ISHR is currently in the early stages of implementing CiviCRM, and is finding the customisable aspects of the software to be especially beneficial.
Developer, Implementor
Réseau Koumbit
As non-profit consultants working for non-profit organizations, we found CiviCRM to be particularly well suited to answer the common needs of activist associations, charities and other medium-sized groups. Based in Montréal, we've helped local and international organizations migrate to CiviCRM to manage their memberships, events, communications and fundraising campaigns. We empower our clients and assist them when they need us.
End-user and Developer
Woolman Sierra Friends Center
Working with CiviCRM enriches our commonwealth. Any investment in CiviCRM is
shared by the community as a whole. Community organizations naturally complement the spirit of Free/Libre Software.
Implementor
BackOfficeThinking
CiviCRM allows us to bring all benefits and capabilities of a large commercial CRM and
donor management system to medium and large non-profits at a fraction of the cost. CiviCRM also allows smaller non-profits to benefit from an integrated solution for donor management, events, bulk email, etc. substantially increasing their effectiveness as compared to managing a variety of nonintegrated software and spreadsheets. Thanks to a strong CiviCRM community, CiviCRM’s functionality continues to advance and CiviCRM’s market continues to grow rapidly.
Comments
Getting ideas
I think it would be helpful to make a tentative list of possible projects, that way you might attract students with particular interest who might not know much about CiviCRM.
For example (just examples):
I repeat the above are just examples that I though of this minute, my point is that I am sure you would be able to attract students and get both useful and interesting work done, just maybe have to start preparing earlier for it :) (actually I just read the whole post, especially the fact that the deadline is on Friday...posting anyway)