We have a couple of customers who have been asking to be able to set-up recurring contributions against pledges. This seems to be a possibly contentious improvement so I'm looking for feedback on it.

Eli Beckerman is the second winner of a copy of Using CiviCRM from Packt Publishing. Eli is excited about the potential of CiviCRM to organize bottom-up transformations to deal collaboratively with the many crises facing the world today.

Packt has also selected a runner-up in its contest: an experienced CiviCRM user from the City Bible Forum, ken, will get a downloadable eBook copy of the book.

Here's some background on Using CiviCRM from Packt's site:

What you will learn from this book:

Sheila Burkett is the first winner of a copy of Using CiviCRM from Packt Publishing. Packt is running a promotional contest where you just have to post into the forum or email them to qualify to win a copy of the book.

Here's some more information about the book from the Press Release:

Using CiviCRM is the first commercially published book on CiviCRM, and came out in February 2011. It will teach readers to build a CRM that conforms to their needs and to integrate it with Drupal or Joomla!. Written by Brian Shaughnessy and Joseph Murray, this book will assist readers in developing an integrated online system that handles contacts, donations, event registration, bulk e-mailing, case management, and other functions such as activity tracking, grants, reporting and analytics.

We just released CiviCRM 3.2.3 – it is now available for download. You can also try it out on our demo site.

This release introduces changes to pledge recording and quite a few bug fixes; for full list of things that has been fixed/improved in 3.2.3, please take a look at our issue tracker.

Unfortunately a bug related to wrong case types being displayed was introduced into 3.2.3 release. The patch will be available in the next 3.2.4 release and could be downloaded here if you want it earlier.

For more details on major new features/highlights, please refer to 3.2 release blog post, here's the short list:

• Usability improvements
• Support for PHP 5.3
• CiviCase Phase 3
• CiviEvent workflow improvements
• Free-tagging, and Tags for Cases and Activities
• No standalone version

When working in setting up and developing websites (among other things) we often have to choose between getting stuck in and getting stuff done the known way or trying to invest time in coming up with a more automated way or efficient way of doing things. Usually at some point we become aware of whether we made the right choice – and I find that moment is normally accompanied by a certain sinking feeling.

Let's hear it for Rayogram and their hospitality to the CiviCRM community by hosting the New York City Meetup last Thursday! We accomplish so much using all of our electronic tools but there is still a kind of creativity that happens so much more efficiently in real time, face to face. One of the breakout groups at the Meetup was with persons interested in talking about CiviPledge. I left energized and excited about improving the tool that we all share. Some of the highlights of our conversation were:

• What is the role of pledges in organizations and CiviCRM?
• How should we handle pledge payments?
• How should we communicate with our members about their pledge payments?

We are finding that CiviCRM/accounts issues are becoming increasingly important for our clients, and Eileen's recent blogs and the discussion they are generating are a fantastic step towards helping find the best way for Civi to deal with financial transactions.

For example, I think it could be useful for Civi to ultimately develop functionality for maintaining simple bank accounts within CiviCRM, so that small organisations can maintain basic accounts without the headaches of integration with an external package.

As cap10morgan noted in a recent blog, non-profits and open source solutions are a natural partnership. CiviCRM has been a fabulous gift to the organization that I lead, Trinity Episcopal Church. It allowed us to move from a FileMaker database accessible only to our office staff to a robust solution accessible to most of our membership. (We constantly remind ourselves that not everyone's online!) We are still using a FileMaker/CiviCRM hybrid solution however and CiviPledge is our roadblock.

Pledge accounting is central to our contribution accounting - 92% of our income is from pledges. Is your organization's income weighted toward pledges? Do you use CiviPledge? If not, what's missing for you? Join the discussion on our forums or edit the specification on our wiki page.

The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) published the results of it's first-ever Donor Management Software (DMS) Satisfaction Survey last week. Nearly 1,000 people participated in the survey - whose goal was to help nonprofits "find the DMS that is best for your organization".

Regulars readers of this blog will recall that we were quite disappointed when the survey was announced - due to the fact that CiviCRM was NOT INCLUDED In the list of Donor Management Software solutions in the survey. The good news is that folks in our community stepped up nicely. Despite being a "write-in candidate" CiviCRM got the fourth highest number of respondents to the question "Please select the product that you consider your PRIMARY donor management system."