Photography by Alicia Fox / Cool Earth
Cool Earth is the charity that works alongside indigenous villages to halt rain forest destruction. Saving the rain forest isn’t a new idea. But managing to do it is. Over the last 40 years, half the world’s rain forests have been destroyed. That’s why Cool Earth decided to go about things differently.
Our model puts local people back in control, giving them the resources they need to keep their forest intact. And by saving at-risk rain forest millions of acres of neighbouring forest are put out of reach of...
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Over the past few months we've had a few requests for more clarity in on how the CiviCRM community is structured - how things are organized, lines of accountability, etc. It's crucial that this stuff is well understood by everyone that uses and contributes to CiviCRM. It helps us stay productive, helps newcomers understand how they can get involved, and helps us to scale.
We realised that although we've done a fair amount of work recently on explaining how the core team works and how you can interact with us, we haven't spent much time bringing clarity to the wider community. Our structure is often explained as 'the core team with a community of contributions. The lack of further definition of our community is telling, and its time to give it a bit of definition. It's time to say hello to teams and working groups.
There are a few 'interest groups' in our community already - they've sprung up...
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Girls on the Run's mission is to inspire girls to be joyful, healthy and confident using a fun, experience-based curriculum. Teams are paired with coaches who teach valuable life skills over a 24-lesson curriculum that culminates with a 5K run at the end of each season. Every 5K event requires the registration and coordination of thousands of team coaches and over 800 volunteers. Also, as part of sharing their strengths with the community, each Girls on the Run team plans and implements a community service project, which allows them to discover the unimaginable strength that comes from helping others.
With so many volunteers and activities, Girls on the Run St. Louis had a few big questions to solve:
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How could they migrate their data away from DonorPerfect, a CRM that was...
CiviCRM packs a ton of features for nonprofit organizations, ranging from contribution and donor management, to event management and mass email capabilities. If you use CiviCRM, then you already know that it’s a competitive piece of software for nonprofits. And yet, as a CRM, it’s not widely known. In fact, it wasn’t even listed in Idealware’s recent review of plugins for nonprofits using WordPress.
As an open source project, CiviCRM relies heavily on community participation to not just build the software, but to spread the word, and to encourage adoption of the CRM and participation within the community. Just this year we’ve taken steps to form more defined project teams, including a community team, in order to help attract and cultivate contributions of time and talent to this end.
Just as...
Read moreMy first introduction to the community was at a training in Gent in 2013. The training was given by Xavier and Erik Hommel. And they did a very good job because I am still part of the community.
It was a two day training and during the training I learned how CiviCRM works and how to develop custom functionality. Xavier and Erik did not only explain the technical stuff they also explained how the community works and how to become part of the community. The latter was quite easy and I did not expect it to be that easy. They explained about the forum, which is almost dead now, and what they explained was that it was the source for asking questions and getting answers. They also explained that it was not only a place to get answers. It was also a place to give answers.
I thought that I did not know much and that I was not in a position to give answers. But I was wrong. I did know a lot, the first thing I knew a lot about was development stuff because I was a developer for...
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If you haven't checked it out yet, the CiviCRM Stack Exchange is a Q&A site where folks can get free support for using CiviCRM.
It's simple to use - ask a question, get answers. Users vote on both questions and answers, and there's no chit-chat, just answers. You earn reputation points when people vote for your questions and answers. Many top CiviCRM experts use the site and answer questions.
If you're looking for a way to support the CiviCRM community with minimal investment, using the site is a great way to do it! Asking a good question - or upvoting someone else's good answer - both help to improve the quality of CiviCRM support. We're also looking to increase our Stack Exchange traffic so our site is promoted to the top tier of exchanges. So if you've visited before, now's a great time to visit again.
Take a look today - take the 60 second tour or...
Read moreAt our wonderfully well-attended and interesting CiviDay Bristol (here and here), somehow I managed to become co-opted as the chief co-ordinator for CiviCON London 2016 - 6th-7th October - and I'm reliably informed that organising for this event starts now, or earlier even.
The first thing for me to to do is to find out all the stuff I don't know, things like like who is going to help me, what resources exist from previous conferences and what the budgets are likely to be. Michael's budget summary for Colorado 2015 is particularly interesting https://civicrm.org/blogs/michael-mcandrew/civicon-denver-2015-financials but would be much more useful if the exchange rates weren't so volatile!
I'll also be...
I was introduced to CiviCRM back in 2012 by Dana Skallman. To this day two of her comments stick with me:
- "It's Awesome"
- "It's brand new for WordPress and maybe a bit rough around the edges."
Since that time I've been immersed in the CiviCRM world and am very happy to be here.
I am part of Tadpole Collective and we focus on WordPress and CiviCRM implementations. We've been part of many improvements in CiviCRM for WordPress to date and continually work on improvements. We've seen WordPress improved in every release, from shortcodes to a streamlined install process.
The best part of being part of this CiviCRM project is the community. I've been to CiviCon, the User Summit and four different Code Sprints, most recently at the Vail Sprint this past January. It was called the "Drupal 8 Sprint" when I first read about it. You might ask why I, a developer from a...
Read moreWe had a awesome CiviDay 2016 in Amersfoort yesterday! A record 40 participants made me happy before the day even started :-) The Socialist Party was our host for the day, and they had prepared a morning session where they shared their experiences with CiviCRM, showed what they did and explained what they want to do in the future. A really impressive and inspiring session with the underlying message: there is so much to gain if you start using open source software, become part of a community and feel you can actually have an impact on your toolset!
After lunch we had a CiviCRM introduction session for newcomers and a bunch of interesting sessions on CiviSepa, CiviRules, Drupal Webforms and Views and PUM Senior Experts...
Read moreAs the CiviCRM community grows and is increasingly active, the need emerged to measure our work, our impact, our communications and many other aspects of this community in order to judge our progress and influence our roadmap. The CiviCRM statistics project was born.
Since it's inception, this effort has grown in scope and capabilities and now makes available real-time statistics on:
- the users of CiviCRM (counted as 'sites' representing an active installation of CiviCRM),
- key operational (# contacts, #transactions, ...) and technical metrics (server configuration) on these active installations,
- CiviCRM downloads per day, including from which country,
- metrics on software issues logged into our bug tracker,
- and many more ...
All of these statistics are produced with the utmost respect for the privacy of our users and contributors: no identifying data of any sort is ever collected (not even IP...
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