Upcoming Events
San Francisco CiviCRM Meetup - February 8th, 2012
February 8th, 2012
Come meet others from the Bay Area who are interested in, using or developing (more...)
UK usergroup - London meetup
February 8th, 2012
Come and meet others from the UK that are using CiviCRM or are interested in (more...)
London user and administrator training
February 23rd, 2012
A comprehensive two day hands on training course covering the configuration, (more...)
CiviCRM London sprint Feb 2012
February 27th, 2012
Following the CiviCRM training here in London, we will have a CiviCRM code (more...)
UK South West - CiviCRM Meetup
March 20th, 2012
Come meet others from the Area who are interested in, using or developing for (more...)
[Bristol, UK] user and administrator training
March 21st, 2012
A comprehensive hands on training course covering the configuration, (more...)
San Francisco user and administrator training
March 29th, 2012
A comprehensive two day hands on training course covering the configuration, (more...)
CiviCRM Usability, Test and Code Sprint - San Francisco (March 2012)
March 29th, 2012
This usability, code and test sprint is targeted at CiviCRM users and (more...)
CiviCon 2012 San Francisco Bay Area - April 2nd 2012
April 2nd, 2012
CiviCon is THE annual event bringing together the people who use, develop, (more...)
CiviCRM Documentation, Test and Code Sprint - after CiviCon San Francisco (April 2012)
April 4th, 2012
This sprint is targeted at CiviCRM users and developers who want to work on (more...)
CiviCRM user feedback from Wikimedia and QuestionCopyright
- Not Just a Contact Database
-
These optional components give you more power to connect and engage your supporters.

civiCASE
Case management for clients and constituents.

civiCONTRIBUTE
Online fundraising and donor management.

civiEVENT
Online event registration and participant tracking.

civiMEMBER
Online signup and membership management.

civiMAIL
Personalized email blasts and newsletters.

civiREPORT
Report generation and template management.
Earlier this week we received some pretty excellent feedback from some CiviCRM users. This made our week, so we decided to share :). Erik Möller from Wikimedia Foundation writes:
CiviCRM definitely is becoming the leading open source product in this space, and its growing mindshare and modular framework is helping it to support other non-profit needs as well. Wikimedia has been using CiviCRM as a fundraising backend for more than a year now after some early experiments with it and custom solutions - we're also funding custom code development that goes back into the core. I hope that most of the non-profits on this list that need fundraising support technology will consider using it, so that we can all help contribute to an improving infrastructure for the non-profit sector. :-)
Another piece was from Karl Fogel (of subversion fame) who uses CiviCRM for QuestionCopyright.org. Karl also blogged about CiviCRM on his personal web site: CiviCRM saves the day. Here are some quotes from Karl:
For those of you running foundations that have members and/or accept
donations and/or hold campaigns and events:
If you're trying to figure out what software to use to track this stuff,
give CiviCRM a try. We (QuestionCopyright.org) are using it in its
Drupal-module incarnation, and it's totally saving us, now that
donations are coming in at a higher rate than manual processing could
handle.
Some pros:
* The interface is intuitive enough. People outside your IT staff can
use it.
* The entities and relationships between them seem to be arranged the
way one would want.
* It can talk to payment processors (like PayPal and Google Checkout).
* It's Free (obviously).
* Paid support is available: http://civicrm.org/professional. (I got
good free support from Donald Lobo in #civicrm on irc.freenode.net;
not sure how much Donald wants me shouting about that here :-) .)
Some cons:
* Installation required IT expertise; depending on what you enable,
there's some placing of magical keys into config files, etc. The
installation and maintenance procedures will feel very familiarly
"open sourcey" -- this may be a good thing or a bad thing depending
on your tastes.
* There can be places where the UI makes you stop and think for a
moment. I've never gotten lost yet, but I've occasionally had to
ponder what move to make next.
* We ran into some http:// vs https:// problems (some sensitive pages
are SSL-protected), and as a result I'd be logged into the system as
"admin" and still not be able to reach certain pages. This got
worked out eventually, I don't remember the details -- the problem
may have been that I didn't finish setting something up during our
installation.
Overall, CiviCIRM has been very good for us. The other day I had to do
a search for contributors who had contributed over $500 (they get a
special acknowledgement), and it was a beautiful experience, especially
when compared to what we used to have to do in our old ad hoc system.
At http://www.rants.org/2009/04/29/civicrm-saves-the-day/ I describe one
particular feature -- pulling pending payment records from payment
processors automatically -- that's new in CiviCRM and that's useful for
orgs that get a lot of small donations from random sources.
Kinda cool to have such awesome users. Thanx Erik and Karl for promoting us






