Looking ahead to 2014

Now that the holidays are behind us, I wanted to share some of the exciting developments brewing in Civi-world for 2014.

Growing the Community

For most of our history CiviCRM has relied on word-of-mouth rather than traditional "marketing" to drive our growth. This has worked amazingly well, but we think that we can do even better with a more focused effort, and especially by encouraging our wonderfully diverse community members to 'toot their horns'. To that end, a group of CiviCRM partners has formed a marketing team which will be driving a number of initiatives this year.

Some initial plans include:

• provide a "map" of CiviCRM implementations around the world
• add "empowered by CiviCRM" tags to online campaigns and events
• engage public relations experts to help get Civi into the media more often
• support users and implementers in evangelizing at sector conferences
• develop up-to-date and compelling printed materials for use at conferences and meet ups
• create country and language specific CiviCRM community web sites

Something you can do right away to get a real-time picture of the amazing campaigns "empowered by" CiviCRM is to do a search on the word 'civicrm' on Twitter.

Software Releases

As in 2013, we plan on having two major releases in 2014. In addition to Make-it-Happen funded improvements for event registration, soft credits and the multi-record custom data user interface, we are hard at work finding ways to make Civi back-office functions a lot more responsive by using client-side technology. We have also begun the challenging task of migrating our database layer to a more modern platform. This work is a bit like putting a new foundation on your house in that it won't necessarily add any shiny new features - but is necessary to keep us moving forward.

The recent release of several feature-rich extensions - including CiviBooking, Gift Aid and CiviVolunteer - are a good indicator that we'll see a nice flow of super useful and powerful extensions in 2014. We see this is a great source of "distributed innovation" which will benefit our community and the sector - and the core team will continue to push forward the infrastructure and tools which make it easier to develop robust extensions.

Introductory Webinars

Partners around the world have stepped up to offer a monthly series of webinars designed to help folks get started with CiviCRM. This program is a great complement to our online user guide and community newsletter in providing a smoother on-ramp for new users.

Active Contributor recognition

From code and documentation sprinters to bug-hunters, translators, and the folks who lead webinars and provide support on the forums - volunteers are the lifeblood of the project.  Going forward we plan to use the new CiviVolunteer extension to help us do a better job of recording and recognizing these contributions.

Sustainability

The launch of the Partner Program in 2013 represents a significant step on our path towards long-term sustainability. Although we expect to see the growth of this program continue throughout 2014, we also are undertaking additional strategies to engage other stake-holders in insuring their investment in the project. Stay-tuned for some exciting announcements at CiviCon San Francisco.

Our Mission

… and finally, folks on the core team recently engaged with our partners in a spirited conversation to craft an updated mission statement for the project. Check out and comment on the latest draft here. We'd love to hear what you think!