Report from CiviCamp Manchester

There was a great turnout for CiviCamp Manchester on 1 December 2023. It was an international crowd with 72 participants from 11 different countries, and participants from 45 organisations.

Feedback from participants has been positive so far with most rating the day very good or excellent in the evaluation form.

Great to learn, mix and chat with others in the community.

Getting to know the community, getting a sense of how others work with their CRMs, learning new CiviCRM functionalities, having the opportunity to ask my questions/doubts to experts live.

Several people commented on the usefulness of the CiviClinic:

The question and answer session proved invaluable. We were given good advice on ways of solving our immediate problems.

As part of the welcome session, Tim Otten spoke about the core team and its plans for the coming year. Key priorities include:

• replacing core forms using SearchKit and FormBuilder
• improving PHP 8 compatibility
• implementing support for Smarty 3
• identifying a suitable JavaScript framework to replace Angular 2
• refreshing the theme
• developing standalone CiviCRM (without a CMS)
• developing the Order/Payment APIv4
• updating the PayPal integration

Joe Murray followed Tim's talk with a report from the community council - outlining who it is and what it does.

There were three tracks of workshops with two sessions in the morning and two in the afternoon. If you missed a session or want to catch up on the details you can find slides of the presentations below.

We finished the day with a series of quick-fire lightning talks with a strict five minute time limit. Again see the slides below.

Those that were attending the sprint caught a coach to Derbyshire for a week to work on improving CiviCRM's code and documentation. Those not attending the sprint were invited to an informal catch up in the pub.

Sessions

Full programme: CiviCamp Manchester 2023

Slides from the main sessions:

• CiviCRM community council report, Joe Murray, JMA Consulting
• Fundraising with CiviCRM, Izi Clery, Population Matters
• Visualising your CiviCRM data for impact reporting, Dave Moreton, Circle Interactive
• Getting data out of CiviCRM, Rebecca Tregenna, Third Sector Design
• Connecting your website to a remote CiviCRM, Jaap Jansma, CiviCooP
• CiviMail for Marketers, Becky Roberts, Red Hot Irons
• Power up your email communications, Rich Lott, Artful Robot
• Using CiviCRM to grow and retain your supporter base, Louise Melzack, compuco
• Recent developments in SearchKit and FormBuilder, Coleman Watts, CiviCRM core team
• Building SaaS offerings with CiviCRM, Joe Murray, JMA Consulting

Slides from the lightning talks:

• Communications extensions, Rebecca Tregenna, Third Sector Design
• CiviFlow extension, Tom Taylor, Encircle Solutions
• Google Tag Manager, Kurund Jalmi, Third Sector Design
• Drupal Gutenberg, Frederic Skinne, Frontkom
• RFM analysis, Rich Lott, Artful Robot
• Single sign on using SimpleSAMLphp, Deepak Srivastava, Mountev Ltd.

If you spoke at CiviCamp Manchester and your slides aren’t here please send me an email (williammortada@thirdsectordesign.org) and I’ll add them to the list.