CiviCRM for Undoing Unemployment

During last few months Piotr and I have been working on preparing the deployment of CiviCRM for Polish organisation called Foundation for Social and Economic Initiatives (FISE). The long term goal of the project was to deploy our software to support and improve FISE's internal operations in contact management domain, and the short term goal was to use it for "Searching for a Polish model of the social economy" initiative, as the first testing field of the long term strategy. FISE's first initiative to use CiviCRM is a project aiming to support non-governmental organisations working in unemployment area. Large group of selected consultants and researchers will be working with more than 300 target organisations on improving their effectiveness, training their workers and providing opportunities to extend their activities. CiviCRM will be used to monitor these interactions, provide the ability to share the contact information between project stakeholders and improve final reporting upon project's end. A series of trainings will be conveyed as one of the initiative's components and CiviCRM will be playing significant role here as well. We want it to provide the ability to manage the database of thousands of workshop attendees and support running the evaluation of their job situation improvement 6 months after the workshop. Apart from this short term involvement, CiviCRM is meant to become primary contact information management platform for whole FISE team and also become their tool to be integrated in future projects. Understanding this huge, multi-year project well was quite a challenge, however not the toughest one. My impression is that the most difficult part was to decide what information should be stored in CiviCRM's database and what should be left out of it. Of course, each tiny piece of information seemed like the most useful one. Everyone involved was quite creative in working out different reasons to add new fields to the database. How come nobody was creative about reasons to kick fields out from the schema? No idea. However, at the end, (after some really heavy and painful triage) I think we managed get the best balance between information richness and usability. We'll find out really soon if we succeeded. Right now we're working on finalising training materials and next week we're kicking off with internal training for FISE's team and their partners. In further stages of this deployment we'll be working with FISE on improving CiviCRM reporting capabilities and ensuring our software will become integral part of FISE's operations, providing value for their future projects. Keep your fingers crossed. After we're done with the first stage of FISE deployment, we hope to start working with Polish Humanitarian Organisation (PAH) on some really serious on-line campaigning activities – but that's a topic for another blog post sometime soon. Stay tuned!