Blogs tagged "Marketing and Promotion"

Late last year CiviCRM won some seed funding from Mozilla’s MOSS fund to support the core team, and also research our community priorities. We're focussing on two questions connected to CiviCRM’s future growth and sustainability:

• how do non-profits chose their CRM? what would make them consider and chose CiviCRM or not?
• how well do users of CiviCRM in languages other than English interact with CiviCRM and what should we focus on improving?

There’s a lot of possible answers to the first questions, which spans from marketing to visibility, features to usability, costs to risk. Almost everyone in the community has a viewpoint on it; and that’s what’s driving this research inquiry - we want to identify general trends, while tapping into the huge breadth of knowledge between us. We’ve created separate surveys for CRM end-users themselves (who may not be CiviCRM users) and CiviCRM...

I admit it. I tried to implement Salesforce. I was just starting Chase the Music and I had big goals. I’d used CiviCRM for a very small community foundation and it had worked great. But, Chase the Music was going to be big. We needed a Rolls Royce to support some very big and important goals. I researched and found that SalesForce was the Rolls Royce of CRMs. The biggest and best of the worlds organizations were using it. When I read that I could get a 10 passenger Rolls (err 10 licenses for SalesForce) for free I thought WOW. I knew that later I’d have to pay, but for now 10 licenses would last a long time. So, I applied.

The fact that I had to apply probably should have been my first warning sign.

It took awhile, but the then the big day came and I was approved! They accepted me. This was right up there with getting my letter from the IRS for our 501(c)3! I was one of them. Crap, now on reflection – I didn’t want to be one of them, I wanted to be me. I didn...

There are between 10,000 and 11,000 organizations worldwide actively using CiviCRM *right now* to manage hundreds of millions of contacts, receive millions of contributions, register millions of people for events, send millions of e-mails - and many other uses. But, stuff happens.

You may have noticed recently that the count of organizations using CiviCRM in your CiviCRM Resources "dashlet" on your Dashboard has fluctuated. You might be seeing text like this - "Used by over 6,588 organizations". Unfortunately, we recently suffered a hardware failure on our stats server, which is where the dashlet gets the latest count. This is not the same server which hosts our website.

The statistics will soon be back to normal. Please see https://stats.civicrm.org for more updates. Sorry for the confusion, and thanks so much for your patience. 

The marketing of CiviCRM benefits from a large number of individuals that work to promote CiviCRM in their own way. At the same time though, CiviCRM’s marketing efforts tend to move in spurts, often without clear direction or cohesion. Whether it be through running an event, creating some collateral, or hosting a CiviCRM 101 Webinar, there are a number of opportunities to market CiviCRM, and each effort sometimes takes a different approach in doing so. Going forward, the Marketing Team will be tasked with coordinating the promotion of CiviCRM and helping align each individual effort to ensure that CiviCRM achieves greater awareness within and ultimately share of the market it serves.

The purpose of this post is to convene the first meeting of the Marketing Team (comprised of anyone wanting to promote CiviCRM) in order to begin to set priorities for next year. If you’re interested in participating,...