Blog posts by josh

It’s amazing that we’re talking about CiviCRM in 2016. First, because it’s 2016… how time flies! And second, because we’re still pushing CiviCRM forward after 11 years! This year does mark a big change for CiviCRM, however.

I've had the opportunity to present the ‘state of CiviCRM’ now at both the recent DC User Summit and at CiviCon London. While we often talk about and evaluate the features and technical capabilities of CiviCRM, we do at times lose sight of its central purpose... the 'why' behind what we do. Going forward,  we hope to keep this front and center in our communications. Why? (I knew you’d ask that)...

It’s been nearly 15 years since I’ve been back to Europe and to the UK, and never before for a CiviCon (in London), so I didn’t quite know what to expect. Up until about 11:00am on Wednesday, I’d felt quite prepared. But then Tim Otten told me that I was giving the welcome speech and was introducing the keynote speaker. I thought he was joking. After that small oversight on my part, I spent much of the rest of the day preparing to open the conference in front of an international audience.

In case you haven’t noticed, we don’t spend a ton of time on marketing and sales. Not only is our budget for marketing small (and by 'small', I mean 'tiny'), just take a quick look at the makeup of the Core Team and at our roadmap and you should get a good sense of what our focus is (and is not).

We started and ended CiviCon Denver this year by talking about community participation. In her keynote presentation, Stormy Peters of the Mozilla Foundation introduced it and discussed the value of participation in open source communities as well as how it represented a competitive advantage to proprietary software alternatives.

We recently updated our appeal for financial support on our download page and included a financial metric with two specific elements that I want to expand upon. In essence, we’ve published both the absolute dollar amount needed to balance the remainder of our 2015 budget (~ $300k) and we’ve qualified it by stating that this is the amount necessary for sustainability.

Version 4.6, the latest release of CiviCRM, has been out for just over a month now and for the first time we tied in a fairly concerted effort to encourage contributions during download. With the goal of reaching $5,000 in support, this campaign represented another initiative aimed at bringing CiviCRM as a project to a sustainable point. Given that this had not been attempted before, it was a bit of a test to see how the CiviCRM community would respond. So, how’d we do?

In May of 2013, Michael McAndrew initiated a blog post about the Core Team’s efforts to make CiviCRM sustainable. Two years later, we’re still on that path and sustainability remains our goal.

"When you donate and download, you make the statement to the entire community that CiviCRM is a vital, open source platform worth supporting. Nearly 10,000 organizations count on CiviCRM & on your support."

We’re almost 3 weeks into the release of version 4.6 and, based on today’s stats, it’s been downloaded from http://civicrm.org 1,839 times. We’d break 2,000 downloads easily if we added in those from SourceForge, however for the sake of this post, I’m interested only in those from the CiviCRM website because that’s where we’ve promoted a campaign to donate before downloading the latest version.