Blogs

Back in early 2012, I joined AGH Strategies, a CiviCRM consulting shop in Washington, DC that works with clients to offer support, training, implementation and custom development that fits their needs. At the time, I knew very little about CiviCRM, but that quickly changed when I attended CiviCon and then the Code Sprint during my first month with AGH.

CRM Data plans refer to documenting agreements on representation, format, definition and structuring of data. Current and future CiviCRM users can utilise it to increase efficiency, knowledge creation and interoperability with other systems.

In order to optimise and future-proof the CRM system, the data structures, in addition to the data itself, need a good re-work. There are two main steps to the process:

It’s a tad belated I know, but in reality it’s never too late to say thank you for supporting this incredible project. We made a push starting in October 2014 for both partner renewals and new partner additions and can now speak to the results. In the process we received quite a bit of feedback on how to improve the program, a central theme of which is to focus both CiviCRM and partners on growing the entire ecosystem.

The team is super excited to announce that the seventh alpha release of CiviCRM 4.6 is now available for downloading AND you can try it out on the 4.6 sandbox site!

Working as a community, we can create something more powerful and benefit more people than we can working in silos. CiviVolunteer was born from the needs and generosity of a few. Today we invite you to become a CiviVolunteer Champion by funding the new features and improvements that you care about the most. A gracious and anonymous donor is providing a matching grant to the CiviCRM project, and Ginkgo Street Labs has been entrusted to use that grant to continue our development of CiviVolunteer. However, we need your help to take advantage of this. Help us raise $15,000 by March 31st, so the community doesn't miss this opportunity.

Some of you may have heard of CiviTeacher and watched some of the great training videos available on the site. I think it's an excellent resource that walks you through different CiviCRM tasks and features. It gives you access to easy to digest, short videos, which will help you to make the most of CiviCRM. The videos also share best practices and lessons learned that will save you time and headaches by helping you to set up things correctly in CiviCRM.  I thought it would be great to know more about CiviTeacher and Stuart Gaston, who started CiviTeacher, so I emailed him to see if he would like to do a blog interview. Have more questions about CiviTeacher? Feel free to comment to share your questions.

For the past 2 years, the last Wednesday of each January has been earmarked for CiviDay, a worldwide effort to come together and promote all things CiviCRM. This year, CiviDay witnessed 26 events, from virtual meetups to all day affairs, across 13 countries, bringing together newbies and veterans alike to share stories and to learn about CiviCRM and what it can do for organizations everywhere.

Would a Civi integration with WordPress Multisite be useful to you? We're trying to find partners to help us fund a full integration.

Spark Inside is an innovative new charity supporting young people in the criminal justice system to create more meaningful and productive futures through professional life coaching. Our pilot program was met with significant success; an independent evaluation of our one-to-one coaching program with 8 teenage boys leaving prison showed that one year after they had been released, the re-offending rate was 12.5%, compared to the national average of 70%. This year, we expect to offer coaching to 200 young people in prison.

As a follow up to the CiviVolunteer Tips & Tricks webinar, we are scheduling a Ask the Experts Q&A Chat where we can dive into your questions about how to use CiviVolunteer to manage volunteer activities.