Implementor, Developer
CiviCRM LLC
Still thinking of a deep deep quote. Basically:
It is super important for non-profits, advocacy and related groups to take charge of their destiny. Having control of your data is a good start. The crowd-sourced nature of an open source project in so in line with the co-operation and principles of most non-profits
CiviCRM is a project that strives to make the above possible. It is FREE as in kittens.
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
Ginkgo Street Labs
CiviCRM enables me to empower my clients with a database that suits their unique needs.
End-user, Administrator
City Bible Forum
City Bible Forum is an Australian not-for-profit Christian organisation. We need to communicate effectively with our constituents, and CiviCRM gives us a comprehensive set of tools for managing relationships. Interestingly, we often find that new features are being added just as our need for those features is becoming apparent. It's the right fit for us.
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
End-user and Developer
Woolman Sierra Friends Center
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.
Implementor
Progressive Technology Project
The organizations we work with are experiencing the benefits of a robust tool that is
easy to use, supports their work, and allows them to collect and track data from various parts of their organization, such as membership, fundraising, communications, and organizing into a centralized database. CiviCRM as an open-source solution also allows us to nurture and build a user community to share and create a common vision of future features that would be useful to the community organizing field. Just two years after our pilot project, we're currently supporting 30 community organizing groups to use CiviCRM, and the community is steadily growing.
Implementor, Developer
AGH Strategies
CiviCRM allows our clients to have a robust tool for tracking and engaging their supporters that can grow with them. I began as an end user, and now I work with CiviCRM full-time.
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 :-)
DEVELOPER AND IMPLEMENTER
Comments
One more
So I just noticed that the node for the March meetup is no longer visible! Of course, this is because the meetup is past, BUT since the meetup node allows comments it also serves the double purpose of being a discussion.
Therefore...it should NOT disappear. When we solve the above issue regarding more prominent positioning of the next meetup we should also provide an "all meetups" view which should include all meetup nodes in reverse chronological order including old ones.
By the way, that would also mean that "post meetup" thoughts or feedback such as this one, or blog posts about a meetup such as this one or this one, can be posted as comments to the respective meetup node and always be related to it for historical purposes.
This is what I've seen in some drupal groups for example. For example in the drupal NYC group you can see nodes and discussions related to events (especially drupalcamps) from long ago and it is VERY useful.
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