I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We switched to CiviCRM so that we could be sure that our membership data stays safe, secure, and private. Now we have control over our CRM and can customize it to work for our needs.

CiviCRM enables us and our clients to invest precious funds into configuring the CRM to meet organisational needs, and building innovative new features, rather than paying annual license fees. With access to the source code and tight integration with leading website content management systems, CiviCRM is extremely flexible.

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.

We work with non-profits to help them use and understand Civi. It's such an important tool for these organisations and it's great to see people using it in different and interesting ways. Using and working with Civi is made so much more fun and useful by the enthusiastic and talented community surrounding it.

At the Wikimedia Foundation, we leverage CiviCRM to maintain millions of records of donors and their contributions. Working with the product and particularly with the community has been a terrific experience. There's nothing quite like two open source organizations working together to meet their respective goals while ultimately strengthening the open source community as a whole.