Back in early 2012, I joined AGH Strategies, a CiviCRM consulting shop in Washington, DC that works with clients to offer support, training, implementation and custom development that fits their needs. At the time, I knew very little about CiviCRM, but that quickly changed when I attended CiviCon and then the Code Sprint during my first month with AGH. I was overwhelmed by everything I learned but I also impressed with the openness of the community, the kindness of the people I met and the skills that everyone around me brought with them.
Prior to working at AGH, I spent 6 years working at two very different non profits in fundraising. Like a lot of people at nonprofits, who find themselves in charge of the database, I was picked for the job because I was the youngest person on my team. To my surprise, I enjoyed data planning and standardization and made it a priority to develop better business rules and best practices for myself and my colleagues. In both of these positions, I was struck by how many work arounds we had in place with our very expensive proprietary software to get our day to day tasks accomplished. I learned to get anything custom, it would cost thousands of dollars, and this was in addition to the thousands of dollars in licensing fees we were paying annually, it would also make future updates very complicated.
Currently, I am the Director of Training and Support at AGH Strategies. We’ve grown from 2 to 5 in the last three years, and we specialize in custom solutions and ongoing support to clients. In my role, I onboard our clients, which means helping them figure out their goals, what their biggest issues have been to date and how CiviCRM can help them free up time so they can spend their time on more mission focused aspects of their work. In addition to support and planning work with clients, I run our CiviCRM training program. We hold brief trainings on specific topics in our office and we’ve taken our in depth trainings on the road. In May we are holding a User & Administrator training in Chicago, IL.
I joined AGH, because I felt like it would give me the opportunity to make an impact with nonprofits of all sizes and missions. I had no idea the impact I would be able to have by being part of the CiviCRM community. In 2013, after a lot of talk about having an East Coast CiviCRM conference with other Washington, DC based CiviCRM experts, we had the first ever CiviCamp. The goal of CiviCamp was to have a user focused CiviCRM conference close to where there are lot of CiviCRM users. In 2014, we rebranded CiviCamp as the CiviCRM User Summit to make the event feel more welcoming to the average end user. I’m currently busy getting organized for the 2015 CiviCRM User Summit coming up at the end of September.
I’m really proud of how far the conference has come in just two years, we started out in 2013 having no idea if anyone would show up and we happily welcomed 100 registrants in 2014. We have definitely learned a lot over the last two years on what the needs of the user community are and I look forward to having the best User Summit yet in the coming year.
Most significant in all of this, is that I’ve learned how important it is for CiviCRM to hear feedback and have involvement from users. For example, we always need more session submissions at the User Summit and feedback on what we did have on the agenda. All of the CiviCRM community is like that, in order for CiviCRM to be the CRM solution that works for the nonprofit community it serves, people need to report bugs, answer questions on the forum, support Make It Happen opportunities, and act as ambassadors for the project.
