Blogs

Creative Commons has been using CiviCRM for several years. A number of months ago we decided that for our annual fundraising campaign we wanted to streamline the donation process, possibly reducing it to a single click on the CC site.. About a month ago we launched our annual campaign along with a one-click donation process.

The process required a bit of custom coding, but fortunately very few changes to core CiviCRM code. Some of the main benefits of this method are:

We started a project with a Dutch Housing Corporation called 'De Goede Woning' 2 months ago. They use CiviCRM to get a grip on their requirements towards a CRM-package. It is very possible that they will use CiviCRM after the project, but the objective is to understand what CRM means and what is needed for their specific situation. We use bog-standard CiviCRM (version 3.02 on Drupal 6.14 with the Dutch translation) with CiviCase. If you want to know more about the project, let me know! I love telling stories about our projects :-)

Introduction: The Need

Progressive Technology Project (PTP) supports grassroots community organizing groups nationwide that engage in social, economic and environmental justice efforts to empower low-income people and communities of color. These groups conduct phone banking and field canvassing as an integral part of their base-building and voter engagement strategies to engage existing and new constituents. PTP hired DharmaTech to help them build PowerBase: a customized CiviCRM for use by community organizing groups.

PowerBase helps groups manage the following data related to phonebanking and field canvassing work:

voter info, history, and demographics reason why the phonebank or canvass is taking place responses to questions asked during the phonebank or canvass phonebank or canvass status primary language spoken

Joomla has a developers camp scheduled for Dec. 5-6 in New York City, geared primarily toward an introduction to Joomla 1.6. Details and event registration are found here: http://opensourcematters.org/devconferenceinformation.html (note the reg form uses Civi for event info/registration!).

Constituent Relationship Management for Civic Sector (CiviCRM) - Beginners, Intermediate, and Advanced

The team has released version 3.0.2 today. This release includes a critical fix for Group Functionality, and 30+ bug fixes/improvements to existing functionality. We recommend that sites currently running v3.0.1 or v3.0.0 upgrade to this version as soon as possible.

Remember the announcement of Bug Hunter/Huntress Challenge? CiviCRM 3.0 went out a while ago, everyone have been busy with kicking off next version and fixing those few tiny little bugs that showed up in 3.0 stable, but at the same time, the core team has been having IRC, Skype, lunch and other forms of discussions about our contest results. So after this long process, we finally made the decision about contest winners from out wonderful crowd of community members.

There will be an Asia Blogger Festival in HongKong during 6th~8th Nov. I propose a session about CiviCRM to introduce the NGO 2.0 concept and demostrate CiviCRM via in-depth case study. Unfortunately, it was accepted!! I would like to invite CiviCRM community to help us to make this session betrer. plz feel free to comment it. Thanks!! You can check their website and program at: http://www.blogfest.asia/ http://www.blogfest.asia/?page_id=3 The following is the abstract for this session:

Since our first meetup at 2009/08/15, we already met for 4 times and started to do case study by functions. And with many support from Dr. Lee of Dharma Drum University, Petra Lin of TechSoup Taiwan, Jimmy Huang of NETivism and Fu-Yuan Cheng(project coordinator), we are translating the CiviCRM Manual from FLOSS manuals. For more information about CiviCRM workshop Taipei, plz check: http://net2.netivism.tw/projects/civicrm-workshop(in Chinese)

The topic of how to properly greet and send mail to couples, such as "Jane and John Doe" has been discussed many times, such as at the blog post: http://civicrm.org/node/558. But the problem with the approach in the blog ( and included in CiviCRM 3.0 ) Is it requires information about someone's spouse in their contact record and marking half on the contacts "Do not mail" even though there are times when I DO want to communicate with just one spouse or the other for different events.