The November issue of the CiviCRM Community Newsletter will focus on faith-based organisations, and I was contacted by Linda Wu Pagano to write something about our involvement with the project. So here is our story!
I work for the Dublin Buddhist Centre. We are a small Buddhist Centre, part of the worldwide Triratna Buddhist Community, and there’s four of us working full-time on the centre team. The centre is the hub of a Buddhist community in Ireland which now has several hundred people who attend events, and we’ve approximately 2,500 people on our mailing lists. I have several roles in the Buddhist centre – Manager, IT Manager, teaching Buddhism and meditation, being the main events coordinator and planner, and doing lots of other jobs that everyone in a small organisation ends up doing.
My involvement with CiviCRM started in 2008. At the time, the Centre had been using a very outdated version of ACT! for its database needs, which was really cumbersome. I was literally cutting and pasting email addresses into Thunderbird to send out its weekly and monthly emails – in batches of 50 to avoid the mail limits imposed by my server!
Thankfully, I attended a IT seminar organised by the Irish charity resource The Wheel, where I came across more up-to-date CRM packages. On display was both the Salesforce Foundation package and CiviCRM. As with all IT upgrades, we looked at the question of what we needed from the CRM package we would settle on.
Our needs were relatively modest. Firstly, we’d need:
- Easily usable contact management.
- Regular mailing list newsletters.
- Mailing list signup forms.
- Event tracking and booking.
- Custom searches based upon member event attendances.
Being a Buddhist centre, we also would need custom profiles which would not be typical to normal non-profits, in particular to record different levels of engagement and commitment in our community – for example, to record if contacts were ordained or not, or if they were training for ordination. There were also other levels of engagement with Buddhist practice besides ordination which we ritually mark, and this information would need to be recorded in the profile of each contact. All this information, too, needed to be subject to custom searches that were easy to use.
So perhaps one of the main differences between our Buddhist centre and a typical NGO is that our profiles need to be based around levels of engagement with Buddhist practice, rather around different types of donors and subscriptions or memberships. All this entered into the choice of what package to choose.
While the Salesforce Foundation’s package was supported by a huge multinational and well resourced, CiviCRM caught my eye, for a few reasons. The main one was that it was Open Source, and that ethos agreed very readily with the ethos of the Buddhist Centre. Our Buddhist community tries to operate on the basis of dana, or generosity, as much as possible. Generosity is sometimes described as the central Buddhist quality – when it’s there, everything else that’s positive flows out of it. On our centre team, for example, we work on the basis of generosity – the core principle being ‘give what you can, take what you need’.
So obviously Open Source is a really good match for this principle of generosity! I’m very proud to say that the CiviCRM community really exemplifies this spirit too, as became obvious to me very early on in my research in choosing between the two CRM packages.
As well as all this, CiviCRM had all the functionality required and more. It felt important to support and promote a smaller, more community developed CRM than a multinational. And CiviCRM was incredibly well supported by a team of dedicated (and mostly volunteer) helpers, whose advise was freely given and very helpful and accurate.
So I put my slightly rusty IT skills to use and within a couple of weeks had migrated the old database of contacts into CiviCRM on a Drupal installation (this would have been CiviCRM 2.2 or so). For simplicity, we initially used CiviSMTP, an excellent service to help set up email infrastructure for CiviCRM. This is a paid service, though very reasonably priced and I can heartily recommend it to people. We eventually moved from this and from our incredibly cheap and somewhat unreliable hosting to CiviHosting, who we’ve found very helpful and whose servers have been very reliable and fast, with Hershel Robinson, who works there, in particular being a great help.
The immediate benefit to all this was being able to adapt and individualise newsletters appropriately to people of different involvement. New mailing lists evolved, to the point where the centre’s mailing lists are now almost three times as large as when we first started with CiviCRM five years ago. All this is in addition to having a fully functioning and powerful CRM package. So we’ve been very happy with CiviCRM.
What’s next for the Dublin Buddhist Centre and CiviCRM? I’m currently engaged in a redesign of the Buddhist Centre’s main webpage, which will eventually involve moving the whole site to Drupal, using CiviCRM to manage the display and booking information of the many events that we run, as well as allowing members to edit and change their own information and newsletter subscriptions. There are lots of interesting extensions catching my eye recently too, such as CiviVolunteer, UK Phone Number Validator (hopefully adaptable for Ireland) and Mobile Client WebApp. So perhaps they’ll be implemented in the future!
And, as in any small charity, I’m thinking of the ‘What if I was hit by a bus?’ scenario, so making all this very accessible and usable to the rest of the Centre team when I’m not around is a big plus too, which Drupal and CiviCRM can do.
Overall, it feels like I’m still only scratching the surface of what’s possible with the packages, and am looking forward to developing it all more!
