A few weeks ago, I went to CiviCon. As a fairly new end-user, this was an incredible experience. Not only did I learn an insane amount of information and receive a wonderful training at the User and Admin training, but I got to interact with other people that use CiviCRM in the same way I do. I am a fundraiser for the Secular Student Alliance, and everywhere I looked I saw other people using CiviCRM to raise money: from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, San Francisco Baykeeper, and so many more.
I wanted a place where I could keep coming back to these professional relationships. CiviCRM is such an incredible product because of the community built around it. Throughout the conference, all I was thinking is, “How can we make sure these interactions among users aren’t lost after this conference ends?”
One of the suggestions I heard was to take advantage of the forums. However, the forums can be a scary place if you aren’t a developer. Digging through the forums on using CiviCRM, the first post I saw was titled “CRM-8744 breaks sending emails to SMTP servers requiring TLS & authentication”.
Huh?
As a person untrained in any sort of coding, that is terrifying gibberish.
There is already a place on the Community Forums geared towards users: the “User Groups” subforum. However, it is heavily focused on language and country specific user communities. These are very important, but I want to see more communities focused on how non-profits use CiviRM. Two of these currently exist on the forums, but neither is very active.
I would like to propose an expansion of this user community. Rather than calling it “User Groups”, title the sub-forum “End-user Discussions: A place for End-users to exchange ideas, ask questions, and share suggestions.” This would be a board where End-users can come together and, in non-technical language, discuss problems and share solutions and innovations.
It would also be a place for more subforums to spring up. Using CiviCRM to send mass communications to people? Take part in a “Using CiviMail” subforum, where participants can share some of the tricks they have learned to dedupe mailing lists. Are you a professional fundraiser like I am? Check out “Fundraising with Civi” and see the cool customizations people are doing to their donation pages, or get advice on how best to construct your donation page.
I think these End-user forum spaces will be a starting point for an expansion of the End-user community. If you are interested in helping to make the forums a friendlier place for CiviCRM end-users, send me an email! I can be reached at jessica DOT kirsner AT secularstudents DOT org, and I would love to have help and input as I try to make this happen.
Comments
Hi Jessica
This sounds like a really valuable initiative. Although I'm a consultant/implementor type I'm also an end user and i work with plenty of end-users. I agree totally that the forums as currently construed are potentially a pretty scary place to go for non-technically minded folks, so I very much support your focus. Let me know if I can do anything to help make this happen.
Graham
Hi Jessica,
There's definitely been a void in this area, and I think the folks at Civi realize that. Andrew Hunt is leading the effort to put together a CiviCamp DC Sept 4-6th (my firm is one of a handful of other firms helping him in this effort). During this event, the plan is to have a Users Showcase where users can informally present about how Civi has helped their organization. In addition, we're thinking of having a session where users can bring their "problems" and seek assistance from a developer/implementor "expert".
Sessions like this go hand-in hand with the need to have the end user community that you pointed out.
Linda
I second what she said.
Especially now that CiviCRM is available for WordPress, this need is growing. Civi is reaching a different audience than the typical Drupal/Joomla administrator.
Hi,
Completely agree that the technical side is, so far, fairly more visible in the forum. However, I was under the naive impression that the "using civi" and its subfolder were meant for more end user profiles. I browsed it right now, and indeed, that's still fairly technical oriented.
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/board,14.0.html
I'm not sure how to be sure that the new forums you want keep the right focus and don't end up taked over by discussions that are too "low level" oriented. Something we've done at the other end of the spectrum on the developer/API forums is to move away to the "using civi" forums all the posts that weren't about development issues, I suspect that you will need to do the same and police the forum until the right kind of neighbourough is created and that visitors get directly what is the general focus of the forum (you could as well try to clarify on a introduction post, but in my experience they aren't read)
Good luck, good initiative!
X+
Personally, I found “CRM-8744 breaks sending emails to SMTP servers requiring TLS & authentication” to be an inspiring piece of work. ;-)
Just wanted to share the link to the slides of the presentation Jessica gave at CiviCon last month, thanks for this Jessica :)
http://sf2013.civicrm.org/sites/default/files/slides/jessica_kirsner.pdf
The only issue I would take with this approach is that often discussion in a forum type setting for end-users is just that, a discussion. Often forums are used as solutions to specific problems rather than discussions about use cases and exploring alternative ideas/approaches to problems. I think the meet ups help facilitate this much better than the forums. I also think that end-users would not be so intimidated by the forums and the technical jargon within them if they felt comfortable about posting in them and maybe a preface of "please use layman's language" when asking for help.
I might suggest something a bit different. What about an online monthly meet up for end-users. Maybe first half as a presentation by an organization about what they did based on who they are and why it worked or didn't. Then just as with the in-person meet ups a open forum where any end-user can ask questions and we could use one of the demo sites to show all end-users what is being suggested as the solution(s) to their questions. I think people often forget that most solutions come from a combination of the CMS and Civi rather then just an approach that is solely Civi.
Just my two cents worth.
hey nasact / adrian:
Do you want to lead the first few user led and driven google hangouts and structure a model for the future? would be great for you and/or someone else to help make this happen
lobo
Absolutely good sir. How should I proceed with this. I have not coordinated anything before for CiviCRM so any suggestions would be helpful. Or if you want to team me up with someone I am happy to do that as well.
folks like michael mcandrew and the rest of the community. We can get u started out there
lobo