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CiviCRM and Europe

Published
2009-03-25 09:51
Written by
fmoretto
In brief: CiviCRM is having a good time here in Italy, associations and NGOs are very interested into the platform and how they may use it in order to reduce expenses and improve their "performance" in fund-raising tasks and management of databases. Since the last summer I've started my "crusade" as CiviCRM evangelizer delivering at least five speeches (two in UK and three in Italy) talking about advantages and capabilities of our beloved platform and showing how to implement CiviCRM also in small-to-medium associations (and building one of the very first "live and working" implementations here in Italy was really useful to have a full case-history, btw... the named association is Algiusmi - Alumni association of Law Faculty - Milan University ). In the last months I've started to work harder to push informations also in our national FundRaising Association and -generally speaking- among opinion leaders and -why not- media. Just after the latest speech (14th march) I was lucky enough to be interviewed by the national TV and they're hopefully going to broadcast it in the next days. In that occasion -and after a brief chat with Donald- I've put in place a website devoted to "end-users" in order to give informations useful to people -inside associations and NGOs- that want to use new tools like CiviCRM (and they're really amazed about what they can achieve with it) but that are -unfortunately- very low skilled about foreign languages and technologies in general. And so www.civicrm.eu was launched.... as you can see it's a drupal 6 with multilingual capabilities (at the present time italian is -obviously- quite populated and other languages... a bit less) with a very simple "mission": talk to "non-techies" in their native language and explain why CiviCRM is so good and why they REALLY have to implement it just right now ;-) (this approach arises from my past as a direct marketing specialist into B2B communications - ah, those bad habits...). I have to say that civicrm.eu doesn't want to replace any part of the present civicrm.org institutional website, it's something that I've considered useful to build-up and I think that local developers from different europeans country may find it useful in order to inform their audience in the local language and giving the local references about who can "do the job" in their country/region. Naturally the website is open to local contributors and I'm ready to give permits to people involved with CiviCRM and willing to translate and add new contents. At the present time I'm really wondering what CiviCRM european developers think about this idea and whether they consider it useful in order to propagate knowledge about the platform. Merging civicrm.eu into a section of civicrm.org could be interesting as well... For those reasons I think that it'd be cool to organize a "european" confcall and discuss how to build synergies and information exchanges on "this part of the ocean". Bye, Francesco
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CiviCRM

Comments

Hi,

Congratulations on your initiatives, try to catch you on TV and youtube it.

Sure, we should tighten the links between the European users, but as the end-users needs, not that convinced that they are that different from the US and the EU. I'd say that your initiative and having a better end user description would benefit everyone, Yankees included ;)

Seriously, I'm concerned that too many "competing" initiatives are overlapping and ultimately diverting energies. What about organising a quick call with the other active users in the EU community see what we can do, and help Michael organising the next meeting ?

X+

Hi Francesco,

Really interesting - sounds like you have been very busy since we last met and congrats on your TV appearence! :-) I'm looking forward to a Europe teleconference. In the mean time, here are my thoughts...

My understanding is that there are two aspects to what you are trying to achieve:

1) effectively communicate with non-techies in their own language

Great idea. This work might partner up nicely with a project to redesign the civicrm web presence that is being discussed on the wiki at the mo. Brian Shaughnessy is saying similar things to you on that page: "I'm sure there are a lot of low-tech staffers and IT consultants who are surfing the web trying to find a solution for donation management, membership management, CRM, etc. who come across CiviCRM. IMHO, this segment is where the website is weakest. We could do a better job communicating what Civi does, how it does it, and what it takes (in terms of implementation resources) to get it up and running".

Also, is this language specific, rather than location specific? - South America springs to mind as a place with lots of people that would benefit from reading about CiviCRM in Spanish/Portuguese. And even though the Australians, Brits, Kiwis, South Africans, etc., are spoilt already, they could also do with more non techie info on how to use Civi.

2) help people get localised support (in Europe)

This sounds great too. Chris Ivens blogged on something similar and I'm keen that anything that we set up in Europe is expandable to other parts of the world, and then back to the US again.

OK, looking forward to the conference call - April 6th onwards would be great for me.

Michael