Published
2014-06-25 08:03
The Friends of the San Pedro River (FSPR), founded in 1987, is a volunteer, non-profit organization dedicated to the conservation and restoration of the river through advocacy, education, and interpretation. FSPR coordinates its activities with the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the land manager of the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area (SPRNCA) and the National Conservation Lands. The FSPR operates a gift and bookstore, leads guided interpretive walks/hikes along the river and throughout the adjacent area, presents educational programs to schools and community groups, and assists the BLM in a variety of other stewardship programs like Hands on the Land.
The Friends of the San Pedro River needed a constituent management solution to integrate their 240 members, 70 active volunteers, donor, and prospect records, automate renewal reminders, and capture financial contributions and volunteer hours. According to Executive Director Robert Weissler, "CiviCRM provides a soup-to-nuts open-source solution in which there is no threat of vendor lock-in nor software license renewal "shakedowns" by account management representatives looking to feather their nest and help their executives buy another yacht." The Friends were able to experiment with a cloud-based solution using the Amazon Web Service (AWS) free tier and a Bitnami virtual machine with Ubuntu Linux 12 OS, Drupal 7 web-based content management system, and CiviCRM 4.4. Using the Bitnami management console, creating backups of this virtual host is as easy as a click of a button as is creating a clone of the host to test upgrades that update the core software components and apply security patches. Likewise, starting, stopping and restarting the virtual host is easy, so that backups can capture a coherent database state to maintain integrity and ease recovery if/when needed.
As for CiviCRM itself, the Friends of the San Pedro River focus first on the CiviMember, CiviMail, and CiviVolunteer components, but will be investigating CiviContribute, CiviPledge, CiviGrant, CiviEvent, and CiviReport, among others soon. The Friends found importing the contacts straight-forward by matching columns in a source CSV-formatted spreadsheet to the CiviCRM database structure for contacts. The import of membership records required a little more time owing to the membership type requiring a numerical value on import instead of the label text - a suggestion to improve the documentation! Once in CiviCRM, the records were easy to search, view, and edit.
In order to manage volunteer hours, the CiviVolunteer extension was installed and enabled from the console. This module is a recent addition with relatively spartan features at the moment. The Friends see a volunteer hours import feature along with tabular, multi-record editing (e.g. implemented with Yahoo User Interface "data tables") and volunteer scheduling including regular hours for "duty stations" like our bookstores. We will add our suggestions to the mix to improve the features of CiviCRM in general. It is great to have a community of users in the non-profit world to share experiences and shape software that meets the needs of the various stakeholders in that community. The Friends look forward to exploring the capabilities of CiviCRM further to address additional needs.
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