As part of the the CiviCRM community, you’ve accomplished so much over the last eight years. You’ve helped build CiviCRM up from a simple contact management and email platform to a CRM that is uniquely able to serve the needs of nonprofits -- with support for volunteer coordination, event management, advocacy campaigns, and more. Alongside ambassadors and implementers, you’ve grown the CiviCRM community to include over 8,000 organizations.
As the project has changed and grown, the needs of everyone in the CiviCRM ecosystem have done the same. Nonprofit staff need training to make use of CiviCRM’s extensive features. Implementers and developers need the growing codebase to be stable, secure, and compatible with a wide array of CMS versions.
CiviCRM needs a sustainable source of additional revenue to cover the management and engineerng resources required to meet these needs. Michael McAndrew wrote an excellent blog post detailing the CiviCRM’s budget needs, and the challenges it will face in reaching them. And as with any other issue facing CiviCRM, the community is working together to create a solution.
Through dozens of conversations between people at all levels of the ecosystem, the CiviCRM Member Program has been developed to address these challenges. Joining the CiviCRM Member Program ensures that the project will be sustainable for years to come. My nonprofit, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, will be joining the Member Program because we recognize how much CiviCRM has helped our organization to grow. Jim Meehan thinks that joining the Association makes sense for the Bay Area Children’s Theater because of the $10-20,000 fees they would have to pay for proprietary CRM licenses, and the percentage fees they would have to pay services like Eventbrite if they weren’t using CiviEvent. When Steve Binkowski implements CiviCRM for nonprofits through his work at ADG Communications, he’ll recommend that they join the Member Program because he sees the value of the training benefits for nonprofits with high rates of turnover. And although the budget was too small for Engineers for a Sustainable World to pay for software when Alex Dale first started using the platform, CiviCRM has helped his nonprofit grow to the point where he too sees the Member Program as an important investment for his organization.
The Member Program invites organizations using CiviCRM to support the software that supports their work through annual dues. These aren’t licensing fees. CiviCRM will always be libre and free software, but it isn’t free of cost to maintain. Keeping CiviCRM running costs approximately $500k every year. The Member Program will cover 30-50% of those costs through dues at the following recommended levels:
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Budget of up to $250k: $500
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Budget of $250-500k: $1,000
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Budget of $500k-1.5m: $2,500
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Budget of $1.5m and higher: $5,000
One of the great things about open source software is that when you make a contribution to the community, you see a direct benefit for your organization. The Member Program follows this model by helping to serve the needs of organizations that contribute towards maintenance. When you join the Member Program, your organization will receive benefits like:
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Full access to a library of training videos provided by Civi Teacher.
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A subscription to a quarterly series of member-only webinars on topics ranging from donor management to email marketing
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Discounts of 25% on conferences and trainings
These benefits will vary according to the level at which your organization joins.
This program is still in the early stages of development, and your input is vital. Are there other benefits that you would like to see? Would you recommend the Member Program to your Board of Directors, or to the clients that you implement CiviCRM for? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Comments
Excellent iniciative. I consider fundamental giving something back to the open source projects we use. The fact that they are free doesn't mean that they don't have costs. I like CiviCRM being free (as in speech and as in beer). Thanks to that, I'm recommending it to a lot of groups of activists in Madrid that don't have any kind of incomes. To keep it like that, it's really important for us to support CiviCRM. If we want it to be independent, free and as cool as it is, we need to ensure its financial viability.
My only consideration is that there are more ways to support CiviCRM than giving a quantity that depends on the budget. My suggestion, is to consider as part of this member dues the contributions made via make-it-happen projects or directly-funding functionalities, when the new features are of general interest. It would be a way to promote the philosophy of trying to solve particulare problems in a general way. Do you think it would be a good idea?
I totally agree capo, good initiative, and good consideration!
I think this is a great initiative and I know that many end user orgs will see the value of the offering. However, I'd suggest that levels of membership be made just levels of membership like gold, silver, bronze and about the benefits rather than linked to income so much.
We have a client that as an organisation has multi-million dollar turnover but civi is implemented for one very small project where even $500 of expense would be be carefully considered. The benefits for their single member of staff using civi day to day might well be worth it though.