The community around CiviCRM is both welcoming and vibrant. CiviCRM as a software solution is a powerful and flexible data management solution for a vast array of nonprofit organizations ranging from the startup NGO to the established multi-million dollar foundation. In our daily work we are seeing more and more NPOs moving away from proprietary systems and single vendor SaaS solutions and embracing the open source community around CiviCRM. Organizations using CiviCRM love the extensibility and the freedoms that come with open source, freedom to choose hosting, freedom to choose project partners, and the freedom to re-use, re-purpose and re-deploy without paying extra.

PeaceWorks provides technology solutions for not-for-profit organizations. CiviCRM fills an important niche among our clients who need a flexible, comprehensive, user-friendly, web-integrated CRM solution.

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 run the CiviSMTP Service that provides an easy and reliable way to send your newsletters using CiviCRM on Drupal/Joomla/WordPress platforms.

We feel there are too many obstacles facing not-for-profits (NFPs) considering commercial CRM offerings, including many of those that are charity oriented. From licensing models which restrict the fluid expansion of an organisation's user base (why should you be punished with higher costs for being successful?), to support from commercial companies being inherently tied to one supplier; a NFP would benefit from the option to 'shop around' for those most appropriate, e.g. based on: proximity and availability on-site, cost, experience, value added services... They also often lack the capacity for charity relevant workflows, necessitating either customisations, complicated and inefficient workarounds or an en-masse call for new functionality, as individual charities do not appear to carry the weight required to influence subtle NFP-only changes to market leading software, without large expense.

On the flip side, CiviCRM is completely free and open-source, carrying with it a friendly, hard-working and enthusiastic community of developers and implementers, constantly listening to the users' needs and sculpting future releases to the requirements of NFP organisations. This is exciting!