In october 2019 I spend a few days with the community at the Summit in Barcelona, and it was inspiring as usual! On the way back out of all the things we discussed two themes kept going around in my head. The first was the need for more marketing material that was felt by all present, and the second one was that in my opinion CiviCRM = software + community.
On the first: I truly believe that our marketing has to be done by partners in their own region. They know what is required in their area and how they can approach the market, central initiatives in my opinion run the risk of just focusing on the software and making material that makes us an also-ran by searching competition with software suppliers that are much better at marketing their software. However, because quite some partners also want to do something centrally I was wondering what I could think of that would make sense to me to create centrally.
Linked to this is the second point. I believe we should focus on our unqiue selling points rather than trying to compete with the likes of Salesforce. We are different, and for me the difference is in the vision and the community.
In our (as in CiviCooP) marketplace (The Netherlands + Flanders) there are still lots of non-profit organizations that never hear of CiviCRM. So it would be nice to have something that could give them an impression of what CiviCRM is (software + community + open source) in a short blink. As we in CiviCooP (like most other partners) do not do sales in the classic sense but rely on potential customers finding us, it would be nice to have an instrument that we can use to make sure they can find CiviCRM.
So I thought making a good introductory movie about CiviCRM of a few minutes would be really nice. When I got back I discussed this idea with my fellow CiviCooP-ers and they all agreed that would be a good idea and we would be willing and able to put some funding into this. Next question: who do I know that can do this? Ideally someone within the community that knows.....ha! Got it. Nic Wistreich! Active in the CiviCRM community, does stuff with our website but was originally a visualist and movie director.
So here it is: https://vimeo.com/screenis/civicrm, an introductory movie about CiviCRM that we really love! Shot during CiviCamp London and a sprint at Amnesty International Flanders. It will be available to all of you (Creative Commons license) to use, adapt, transfer and show. Funded by CiviCooP, JMA Consulting, Semper-IT and Systopia.
Introducing CiviCRM from visualist on Vimeo.
Nic and I would like to see it as the first of many CiviCRM movies, and we already have enough material to be able to create a showcase movie on Amnesty International Flanders. At this point in time we have created what we had budget for, but Nic really would love to do more. Check out his webpage on the subject at screen.is/civicrm.
Comments
This is super cool :) Was nice to see many old friends and community members. So proud and so glad that CiviCRM has become such a strong, thriving and powerful community.
Awesome inititiave, Erik H :)
That's a cool movie! Presents CiviCRM really nicely and shows what makes us different. Good job.
Great work! This sort of thing will be very useful.
Very cool, thank you!
Well played!
This is amazing, well done Erik!
I'm keen to share this on LinkedIn and Twitter - I see that by your text, that's okay to do. But do you mind if I download and post this directly to LinkedIn? Will credit it appropriately, of course!
Not at all Bruno, thanks for your kind words :-) It is meant to be spread and enthuse others about CiviCRM. We are planning on writing a LinkedIn post in Dutch to use the movie to promote CiviCRM as well.