Your nonprofit doesn't have just one fundraising strategy. You have many. Think events, donor letters and appeals, e-newsletter blasts, planned giving, and capital campaigns. Each of these strategies typically targets a specific segment of your community, even if the funds raised impact the same budget line.
Are you responsible for planning, managing and monitoring campaigns for your organisation? If yes, you are probably using CiviCampaign to link contributions and campaigns and analyse their success.
The ability to create petitions in CiviCRM was a tremendous move forward for people using CiviCRM for political organizing. The petitions feature took another step forward with the Petition Email extension, that allows copies of your petition to be automatically sent by email to a given target. However, the holy grail of e-advocacy was still just out of reach: automatically sending your petition to the petition signer's elected official.
Now, CiviCRM will have it.
With the 4.3 upgrade, the Progressive Technology Project has made a number of important steps toward breaking out our work into pieces that others can use on their sites. This blog will begin a series of (hopefully) weekly blogs outlining new functionality that others can use.
Our first blog features the civicrm_petition_email Drupal module. Thanks to the hard work of agh1, a Drupal 6 version of the module is available (https://github.com/agh1/civicrm_petition_email). We just finished porting it to Drupal 7.
For the impatient:
Hi,
The code sprint in London has finished yesterday. It's always a pleasure to see old civi friends and meet new ones. Thanks to Michael and Katy to have organized it. Time for a quick update of what I've been working on with the most obscure title I could find. My focus has been on usuability to make civicrm easier and faster to use.
The CiviMobile web app is now underway and being developed with the jQuery Mobile framework (HTML 5).
The app is Based on the prototype that Xavier and Kyle created, and is beginning to take shape, the functionality in place at the moment includes contact/activity search, add contact and view list of events. It’s intended to be used by an organisation’s staff, as a tool for them to use on the move.
In doing some research for a potential project, I was exploring what kinds of eAdvocacy options were available to plug in to CiviCRM. Many of the big commercial eAdvocacy tools have big commercial price tags to go with them (and don't integrate directly with CiviCRM besides).
In an older thread on CiviCRM, mbriney describes the problem:
Texting - sending short messages via sms to cell phones is a powerful but untapped tool for community organizing. Recent Pew Internet studies have shown that young people of color use texting far more than other demographic groups, and increasingly access the internet and communicate solely through their mobile devices. Given this, texting has tremendous potential to help community organizing groups in the US communicate with their members.
