When Kami Griffiths at TechSoup approached us a few months back about doing an introduction to CiviCRM webinar, I was happy to jump in. However I had no idea what a great opportunity this would be. We recruited a long time user and supporter - Jeff Porter of the Foundation for Prader-Willi Research to share their experiences implementing and using CiviCRM. A few days before the session, Kami led us in a walk-through. This was very helpful and led me to completely revamp my outline and slides to focus more on examples and "real-life solutions".
Despite a few glitches (mostly me having some problems getting my audio loud enough) the webinar turned out to be quite successful. We had more than 170 folks "attending" and asking questions at a furious rate on the chat channel (good thing we had fast-fingers Lobo answering questions on the chat). Given that we only had an hour, we covered a lot of ground and the evaluations where quite positive. 93% of the participants said that they had learned new skills or ideas. You can watch and listen to a recording of the webinar on TechSoup's site. Click the "Recording: CiviCRM" link in the right-hand colum. You can also grab a copy of the webinar "slide-deck" from the CiviCRM wiki. Webinar content is "open source" (Creative Commons licensed) so feel free to use it as-is or "remix" it for a different audience.
Living in "Civi-world" as I do, it's easy to make the mistake of thinking that EVERYONE out there in the non-profit / civic sector knows about CiviCRM. The turnout and response from the TechSoup network was a reminder that there are thousands of organizations out there who are hungry for information about better ways to manage their data. Responding to an instant poll at the beginning of the session, almost 10% of the attendees said they were using "index cards / paper", and nearly 70% said they were using spreadsheets to track constituent data They may have heard about CiviCRM but haven't been exposed to a clear explanation of what it does and some compelling examples of how other folks are using it.
Hooking into a wider variety of communities and communication channels is an important part of growing and nourishing CiviCRM. Take a few minutes to think about the online and offline groups that you belong to. How can you reach out to those networks and connect them with opportunities to learn about CiviCRM. You might ...
- schedule a webinar for one of your networks
- present an "intro to CiviCRM" session at a conference
- support your local CiviCRM meetup by recruiting folks to join (or create a local meetup if there isn't one yet)
-
schedule user and / or developer training in your area
Feel free to ping me (dave at civicrm dot org) if you need help getting started with any of the above!
