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The Alliance for Catholic Education at University of Notre Dame is a nationwide program that forms teachers and school leaders and provides research and broad support for Catholic schools across the country. ACE seeks to ensure that none of today’s social and economic hurdles will prevent any child from experiencing the gift of an excellent education. ACE operates very much like a nonprofit in that it needs to steward its financial resources very carefully in order to maximize impact.
Why did you choose CiviCRM?
ACE has been using Joomla, an open source Content Management System for the last 5 years. When the time came to select a Constituent Relationship Management (3 years ago), we gravitated to the open-source community due to our positive experience with Joomla and the relationship we had forged with that community. CiviCRM really stood out because it is an...
Read moreI run an adult education program for my home town’s public school system called Livingston ACE. It’s small. I’m a one-man show. When I was hired for the job several years ago, I promised to transition the program from a paper catalog with no website to a web-based catalog with online registrations and email advertising. I chose CiviCRM. I had no prior experience with it. Nevertheless, within a month I had CiviCRM up and running on a server in my house. My classes were listed online and registrations happened electronically.
Three years later I am still very happy with CiviCRM. I continue to learn how to use it more effectively. There are no more paper catalogs. Teachers can come to me with an idea for a class. I can advertise it and make it happen in a month’s time. Prior to taking the job, catalogs were published twice a year. New teachers would have to wait up to six months for an...
Read moreStudent Voice is a UK based non-profit working to become the representative body for school students, supporting young people in representing their views on issues around education and schools. We asked Rachel Roberts, Assistant Director, a few questions on how using CiviCRM had benefitted their organisation.
Why did you choose CiviCRM as your customer relationship management system, and how do you use it?
As it’s free for any secondary school students in England to become a member of Student Voice, it was important that we had an easy way for young people to sign up and that this would link to a database which we could use to contact them.
We use Civi to easily track our membership numbers along with their ages and geographical locations. We also use it to be able to send direct emails to different groups of students. Through Civi it is possible for adult...
Read moreAn interview with the National Hispanic Voter Educational Foundation
The National Hispanic Voter Educational Foundation (NHVEF) was created to encourage, inform and enable individuals in the Hispanic community to appreciate the importance of voting and to consistently exercise this privilege. This non-partisan foundation is dedicated to helping individuals find their voice in order to make a positive impact on themselves, their family and the community. NHVEF also manages a call center to reach out to the Hispanic community and engage them in this goal through a voter pledge.
Cividesk recently spoke with Nikki Swarn of the NHVEF about their experiences with CiviCRM.
What were you using before CiviCRM?
We were using a system called Jot Form, but it didn’t allow for searches or segmenting the data into groups. Jot Form was a good way to capture information on the backend and fairly easy to use, but...
I had fallen into technology almost by accident. As someone who enjoys delivering solutions I often find myself in conversations with people who are trying to build software infrastructures. It spawned a curiosity of technology puzzles. This brought me to Open Source software and I was soon building and configuring WordPress websites, and creating a workspace that allowed me to collaborate with the larger software communities. I have benefited from using open source software and I want to give back.
I had done some work with CiviCRM on Drupal sites, focusing solely on the CiviCRM pieces before it was available in WordPress. Now the bulk of the work I do is with WordPress + CiviCRM. As a collective...
Read moreWe still have to do a really good showcase, but I do quickly want to share some encouraging figures from the MAF Norge CiviCRM implementation with you:
- in the old system we could process 100 contributions per day, with CiviCRM we can now do 200!
- in the old system it took a couple of hours to send a batch of PDF letters to donors, it now takes me a couple of minutes
Nice eh? Totally out of context and probably not really fair comparisons....but I do like the numbers :-)
Please note that this blog first appeared in White Fuse's website and we've re-posted it here with their permission.
CiviCRM is an open source Constituent Relationship Manager that has been designed with non-profits in mind.
An underutilised feature of CiviCRM is its newsletter functionality, which allows users to create, manage, and send mailings to mailing lists.
While there are already web-based email clients that allow you to do this, e.g. Mailchimp, the benefit of using CiviCRM is that all of the data is centralised, including your mailings.
This means that information such as who is responding to your email campaigns is collected in the same place as your other information about that person, and adding people to mailing lists can be...
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One of the best attended sessions at NTEN's 14NTC was the Data Visualization session. It was not only standing room only, but it also included people sitting on the floor and standing outside the room trying to hear tips and insights about this hot topic.
CiviCRM has a wide selection of reports. Users can choose out of the box reports, but if these don't meet your needs, you can also customize them.
There are times though, that there is a need to analyze data, not only from CiviCRM, but from other applications, such as an online store and/or your CMS. The beauty of CiviCRM is that it's so flexible and open that it can integrate with third party applications like Jasper. We have used Jasper successfully with our clients - in our experience, Jasper offers more flexibility in terms of input and output, reports are quicker to develop and there's no need to know PHP.
Following are four samples of reports that our clients have requested, utilizing...
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