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.

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.

I'm quite impressed with the responsiveness of the CiviCRM community, both from the core developers and many experienced users who have quickly provided answers and ideas in areas where I just needed that extra insight, or where we needed to do something totally new. After several years working with open source software, I'm finding the CiviCRM community to be the most responsive and helpful I've seen.

We make CiviCRM one of our primary offerings because it just provides so much right out of the box that our clients need, without a line of custom code. And when we need to extend it for the clients' unique needs, the APIs and programming hooks let us add in features that would be impossible in some other systems. This means we can provide great value to our clients with quick turnaround times and reasonable budgets, which is great for our clients and for us.

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.

CiviCRM is helping us serve member-based community organizing groups across the
U.S. to keep better track of their events, fundraising, and membership data. It's helping our community to aim higher in terms of what kind of questions they should be asking and what kind of data they should be collecting. We chose CiviCRM because it's the best all-around tool to do what our groups need, AND because it's open source.