Higher Logic, the leader in association and nonprofit community engagement platforms, and CiviCRM, the open source CRM and AMS leader, are announcing an important integration. The Higher Logic community platform will now be able to work seamlessly with the leading open source AMS and nonprofit CRM. CiviCRM has over 10,000 active sites. Additionally, over 2,000 of these sites have at least 25,000 constituents (see Civi stats). This integration to the CiviCRM ecosystem further strengthens its competitiveness in the AMS and nonprofit CRM space.
BackOffice Thinking, a leading nonprofit technology consulting firm, who is also a founding CiviCRM partner with significant experience with Higher Logic, developed the integration.
What does this mean:
- Key contact, group, demographic, and event data will be made available and kept in sync between the two platforms using the Higher Logic API.
- CiviCRM data will be available and utilized across the Higher Logic engagement platform, enabling organizations to develop deeper engagement and meaningful interactions with its members, volunteers, and other key constituents.
Why this is important for CiviCRM users:
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Online communities are a must have for associations and nonprofits. According to MGI’s 2016 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, “76% of associations with increasing renewal rates indicate increased participation in the private social networks.” Moreover, “Networking with other in the field” is seen as the main reason members join an Organization.
- Up until now, the only engagement options were the less complete collaboration solutions provided either through Drupal modules or WordPress plugins. According to Lehman Associates 2017 Technology Study, Higher Logic’s community platform is “by far the most widely used private community application.” And the study also states, “Higher Logic continues to record the highest satisfaction ratings.”
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Associations, member or volunteer driven organizations who already use Higher Logic and CiviCRM will improve their organizational effectiveness with this integration because they will no longer require to manually update and/or create a workaround to sync this data; lack of system integration is commonly listed as a key obstacle to growth and organizational effectiveness.
- CiviCRM is now a genuinely viable option for associations, member or volunteer driven organizations who are looking for a new CRM or AMS and had not previously considered CiviCRM. CiviCRM is the only open-source CRM with direct Higher Logic integration and has many turnkey features that do not require costly custom or proprietary coding.
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BackOffice Thinking’s co-founder and CEO, Paul Keogan, brought this idea to Higher Logic last fall as many BackOffice clients use CiviCRM or Higher Logic. It didn’t take long for the Higher Logic team to jump on the opportunity. BackOffice’s co-founder and CTO, David Schafer, created the solution specification and oversaw the project, working closely with the Higher Logic team.
- BackOffice is helping to lead a change in mindset with nonprofit leaders that poor integration is no longer okay. This integration will break down some of these barriers. BackOffice is leading many nonprofit organizations through transitions with major technology systems to increase organizational effectiveness, decision making, prospecting, donor management, goal alignment, etc., by modernizing and integrating these mostly disparate systems into a better solution set of systems.
