Next year, CiviCRM will celebrate 20 years of existence! And while some things have changed dramatically in both the community and software, our mission has remained the same: to ensure that all organizations, regardless of size, budget or focus, can access a world-class CRM.
Our commitment to this mission is as strong as ever and is, in fact, a primary driver behind an impending change in how we present CiviCRM via https//civicrm.org, its primary marketing channel.
After careful consideration and discussion at the UK sprint in 2023, we decided to move forward with a 2-site approach, i.e. splitting https://civicrm.org into two sites that target two distinct audiences.
- https://civicrm.com for new prospective users and;
- https://civicrm.org for community members.
Or, as Mathieu so nicely put it:
Come for the software, stay for the community.
This blog post isn’t intended to rehash the debate about the merits of a 1 or 2-site approach. There are risks and pitfalls with both and, after reflecting on these, on the health of the project and on the direction we would like to see it go, the decision is to proceed with 2 sites. If you'd like, you can see a brief analysis on Gitlab.
The Main Driver
On the scale of open source projects, CiviCRM is small. Relative to many of the big projects that we discuss on a near daily basis, it is tiny. This is despite the fact that the overall market size, i.e. the total number of nonprofit organizations world wide, is quite significant.
In other words, CiviCRM has, and has had for many years, only a very small slice of the market. And while CiviCRM is technically accessible, in the sense that it can be freely downloaded by anyone, can we honestly say that we’re fulfilling our mission by remaining this small albeit awesome project that few (in our market) have heard about?
Or, is there a component to the concept of being “accessible” that also involves simply being aware that the project exists in the first place? Put another way, how can organizations access CiviCRM if they don’t know about it?
I emphasize the word ‘know’ because this is at the heart of adopting https://civicrm.com as the primary marketing website for CiviCRM; present CiviCRM in a way that is easy to understand for first time, prospective users.
In the big picture, this is one effort to help improve CiviCRM’s overall brand awareness, i.e. to improve that specific component of being “accessible” by raising overall awareness of the project and the software.
A Broader Change
We’ve talked about the need for ecosystem growth several times over the past few years, however we’ve not actually seen much, if any, growth. We typically measure performance by looking at the number of installations, new or active contributors, growth of the partner ecosystem, etc.
Most metrics are pretty flat and have been for a while. This is despite the fact that CiviCRM is, as a product, better than ever with significant improvements underway involving SearchKit, FormBuilder, RiverLea and more.
The Core Team has been increasing its attention to other initiatives in order to complement these improvements in the product itself. Our objective is to help grow the ecosystem by improving brand awareness and by making it easier and clearer to get started with CiviCRM.
In 2019, we launched CiviCRM Spark as a proof of concept to help grow the ecosystem by reducing barriers for new users. While the floodgates haven’t exactly opened as a result of CiviCRM Spark, it has shown some success in its ability to retain users (39.98% of exit survey responders indicate that they’ve upgraded from Spark, and 5.98% have indicated that they’ve upgraded and are using a CiviCRM partner).
Most recently, we worked with Stuart Gaston at CiviTeacher to introduce CiviAcademy with the objective of creating a library of tutorials geared towards helping new users get quickly up to speed on using CiviCRM effectively. Like Spark, CiviAcademy isn’t intended to be a cash cow. Rather, it’s designed to help users get comfortable with CiviCRM more quickly and to create greater stickiness to its ecosystem. Expect a blog post soon about CiviAcademy.
We’re also starting to stick our toe back in the murky waters of social media, dabbling in LinkedIn and exploring opportunities on platforms such as Mastodon. There’s a lot to be done here and, in our view, this is a great opportunity to have more community involvement. If developing and implementing a social media strategy is of interest to you, please reach out to me at josh@civicrm.org.
Finally, next on our radar, is to overhaul the CiviCRM Ambassador program. This used to be much stronger and more effective than it is today, and we’d like to see it come back as a way to help onboard new users that are engaging in the community. Neil P of the CiviCRM Community Council is working with the Core Team to make improvements to this. Stay tuned for updates!
The move to https://civicrm.com is consistent with these initiatives in that it’s focused on improving the initial discovery of CiviCRM and reducing barriers to get started for new users.
Before jumping into more details, I want to say that even though I’m talking only about Core Team initiatives thus far, by no means is the idea of “raising brand awareness” limited to our role. Quite the contrary, in fact!
Efforts such as Compuco’s recent promotion of CiviCRM in the UK’s Fundraising Magazine are huge for CiviCRM and are consistent with the idea of improving brand awareness. As a project, we need to see more of these sorts of things.
Where We’re At and What is Next?
Currently we’re tracking the progress on overhauling https://civicrm.com here: https://lab.civicrm.org/marketing/civicrm-website. At present, we’re nearing completion of the copy in both English and in the supported languages on the site. These include: French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Polish and Ukrainian. Additional languages may be added in the future.
We hope to have the initial overhaul complete in the coming weeks, after which we’ll implement changes on https://civicrm.org to help direct site visitors appropriately.
Our process up to this point has included a fairly thorough review of competitor sites and of relevant topics/keywords, and content development that is consistent with both our brand/voice and our capabilities. These are two really important points that I want to explore more.
First, we have a brand, whether we like it or not. It’s either shaped by us or applied to us, or any combination of both. Efforts in the past around branding have been, how shall I say, painful. In lieu of attempting another such effort, we took a look at our assets, specifically CiviCRM is 1) open, honest and authentic and 2) not constrained in the same way as our competitors.
Let me summarize that by saying that we’re not afraid to air our dirty laundry and that we don’t have the same bottom lines as our competitors, leaving us the ability to tell it like it is without being sales-y or disingenuous. The new content for https://civicrm.com adheres to this and simply lays it out there for people to evaluate.
Second, let’s get real… we can’t compete with the marketing budget of Salesforce or Microsoft or any other investor-funded startup that’s wanting to disrupt the marketing with YACRM (Yet Another CRM). So why should our tactics and strategies be the same? We can’t write enough comparisons or contrast systems consistently enough or post to social media enough, etc. to keep up with them. So why should we? Why not, for example, just use what they produce, like this https://nationbuilder.com/how_is_nationbuilder_different_from_civicrm_plus_drupal, and simply poke holes in it (we’ll tackle that comparison on LinkedIn soon)?
The point here is that we can’t pretend to be a large, well-funded, well-oiled marketing machine, so let’s not try. Instead, let’s be who we are; open, honest, authentic and, well, a bit scrapy at times.
After all, CiviCRM isn’t the right solution for every organization, so we shouldn’t waste time on convincing organizations that it is. Let’s present it for what it is in a clear, digestible way, and trust that organizations have the good sense to make an educated decision and/or capacity to explore deeper if need be, and let’s make it easy for them to do so.
That’s where https://civicrm.com comes in; an honest, no-bullshit initial impression of what CiviCRM is and how to get started for new prospective users.
Some final details
Most of these points are available on the gitlab project, however I wanted to briefly touch on them here as a way to summarize what is in progress at https://civicrm.com:
- Users will be presented four primary ways to “get started” with CiviCRM: 1) Do It Yourself, 2) Spark, 3) Use a SaaS and 4) work with a partner. The content helps guide users based on the pros and cons of the various approaches and encourages them to connect with the community if they need assistance in the evaluation process.
- Demos and case studies have been moved over to https://civicrm.com as these are intended to be marketing and/or resources for users evaluating CiviCRM. They will come off of https://civicrm.org at some point. Currently the process to add or revise these is managed by the Core Team (so if you have additions or revisions, send them to us), however this will change in the future.
- CiviCRM partners are listed on https://civicrm.com though they refer back to their partner detail pages on https://civicrm.org. This makes partners available to both new potential users as well as established community members (likely using https://civicrm.org already because it’s the main community site).
- Analytics to the site will be shared via a Plausible dashboard similar to what you see here https://plausible.io/civicrm.org/.
- This is a first iteration of the site. Other improvements are already being scoped and planned for.
Ok, that was a long way of saying “we’re overhauling https://civicrm.com to provide a better initial impression for first time users”. If you made it this far, thanks for hanging in there!
