I’ve been working as a Project Manager for the IT Department at Amnesty International Spain since the inception of this department, about 3 years. Before it was created, every department used to solve its database needs by creating its own applications. As you can imagine, there were a crazy number of applications being developed, all independent of each other. We had different databases for managing our members, volunteers, press contacts, newsletter subscribers, on line shop clients, etc.
Our highest priority project was to look for an open source CRM that could help us consolidate all our contacts’ information, among other things. CiviCRM’s functionality stood out, but what impressed me more is the very involved community as well as the responsive and easily accessible Core Team. I liked the fact that I don’t have any restrictions because Amnesty didn’t purchase the “enterprise edition”. While evaluating CiviCRM, we posted our concerns in the forum and got lots of responses from the community as well as the Core Team.
Now that we are CiviCRM users, I love being part of this very active and engaged community. I'm still a new member of the community, but I've already seen how some of my problems were solved by other community members even before I realized that I had them! Now, the challenge is to give something back to the community by trying to solve my problems in a good way, a way that benefits the whole community. So far, I have helped develop a couple of extensions: an extension that allows you to specify a default group for each contact created (by members of another specified group), and a Drupal module that improves webform validations adding the possibility of validating Spanish identification numbers. I have also helped develop a Kettle (Pentaho Data Integration) plugin (currently in beta).
I believe that you start taking advantage of CiviCRM when you start thinking that your needs are not only yours. At the CiviCRM Community, that's the general attitude. If one has a problem, one looks for a general solution that can also be useful to others. Everybody benefits from everybody’s contributions, inspiring philosophy, isn't it?
