Published
2014-06-25 09:40
Tribodar Learning Center is a non-profit organization that develops non-formal education activities in a start-up eco-village in Alentejo, Portugal. Our main activity at this moment is to host international participants who come to spend anywhere between one week to several months, learning about ecological agriculture, eco-building and sustainable living. Further, Tribodar has been organizing a small festival since 2013 called Tribojam.
Both the management of the participants and the festival require complex communications. In the past, we used different open source tools (Limesurvey and Mailchimp among others) to collect and process this information. The biggest drawback was the lack of integration between the different tools.
As our IT skills at Tribodar are quite limited, we had to find a solution that didn’t require programming knowledge, but would still be flexible enough to accommodate our complex and growing needs. We knew CiviCRM from earlier investigations when working with Drupal, but had been told it would not work well in a shared hosting environment. Then we ran into a hosting company that advertised specific shared CiviCRM hosting at a very attractive price (tmdhosting.com). We gave it a try, and have since entered the universe of Civi. Although we hope to find a skilled developer soon who wants to help us get the most out of our Drupal/Civi, we are managing to get along and do some awesome things.
It took us a little while to map the extensive toolset of CiviCRM to our own needs. Since then, we set up a Drupal site and decided to use the Drupal Webform for our Participant form for our eco-village. We also use the same tool for the application and registration forms for our Festival in August. For the sale of tickets for our Annual Festival, we use Ubercart, with integrated CiviCRM fields in the checkout page using Webform integration .
Going forward, we will leverage the power of CiviCRM to use the data collected in a fluent workflow. To do this, we will set up CiviCase to track communications with all participants; from the first contact (including any communications that occured during the application procedure through their stay at Tribodar), to the follow-up and feedback after participants have left.
Further functionality that we will tap in the near future are CiviCase, CiviContribute and CiviMail. Allowing past participants and supporters to make donations online can be a great contribution to our limited financial resources.
So far working with CiviCRM has been a very rewarding challenge. Although we have only limited IT skills, we still manage to run a professional and powerful CRM, the fruit of which will be harvested in ever increasing abundance. As we see it, investing in a powerful tool to manage contacts and information flows, is like planting a tree. Maybe you will sweat a bit at first to dig the hole and plant it. At first you may not get much return, as the tree is still small. But from there on, if you keep caring for it, yields will increase year after year. So as the saying goes: “the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, and the best time to start setting up CiviCRM is when you first started collecting data on your constituents”.
At Tribodar we may still be in the beginning phase, but we are on the train, and the journey promises to be exciting. If you are interested in our journey, follow us on facebook www.facebook.com/tribodarpermaculture or come over for a visit!
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