I have always been passionate about the nonprofit sector, and I had the chance to continue growing this passion when I joined iATS Payments in 2012 as iATS is a payment processor working exclusively with nonprofits.
In my role as VP Marketing and Business Development, I am closely involved with the payment processor extension built for CiviCRM. The first version of our extension became available to the CiviCRM community in 2007, and iATS has been working closely with Civi to enhance our extension and update it on a regular basis with features that clients need. We completely updated it in April 2014 and released our latest version 1.4.2 in October 2015, each new version with several features and enhancements.
Also, because we want to encourage adoption of CiviCRM member program, we launched a referral program in April 2015 during CiviCon. Working with the Civi core team we incentivized new iATS customers to also sign up as a CiviCRM member and if they did we paid $200 to the charity. The organization or person making the referral also received $100. The referral program ended on December 31st, 2015 and a number of customers signed up to the Civi member program (with a few moving from competitor software to Civi!)
Partnering up with Civi makes perfect sense since both organizations are devoted to provide the best solutions to nonprofits and help them better accomplish their mission. It is always great to work with a community that speaks nonprofit. It is a perfect fit. As such, iATS continually invests in new features to be added to the extension, for example CC, ACH, recurring, UK direct debit, card swipe, international integration etc. We also invest in the support of the extension, making sure its compatible with the latest stable version of Civi, bugs are fixed etc. We have test matrix cover over 45 various functionalities from single credit card processing to tokenization and recurring Direct Debit transactions in the UK.
The thing that I enjoy the most with Civi is how everyone works together towards a common goal. From code sprints to CiviCon, it’s refreshing and motivating to see a community of consultants, partners and customers getting together to provide solutions for nonprofits. These solutions are built from the ground up for the single purpose of helping the nonprofit sector. When we get together, I can be working alongside or contributing to core stuff that will benefit competitors as well, but it doesn’t matter since we all want to get the job done and help grow the community. We all have one common goal in mind which is to help nonprofits focus their efforts on their amazing causes.
Every time I attend a Civi event, I am truly inspired and motivated to continue working alongside this great community and be surrounded by fantastic people. I enjoy the conversations with both partners and clients, and always leave having learned something new as well as being impressed with what is being achieved.
The growth in numbers and the power of the application itself is a real testament to the community and open source playing together towards the same goals! Its great to be part of the community and a Technology partner of CiviCRM.
