As most non-profits know, driving revenue exclusively off of events can be a hit or miss adventure. Revenues YOY are not consistent, and its difficult to find those supporters who will organize and host fundraising events to support your cause. Many are intimidated by hosting large fundraisers or simply don't have the time or resources to pull it off. So to sum up our problem: we needed a broader more consistent source of revenue to fund our programs. To expand our source of revenue, we looked to our community of donors, families, and fundraisers to raise money on our behalf through their own social networks. The average user on facebook has 30 friends [http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics] which means that we could exponentially increase our reach through online social networking interaction. All we needed was to setup the campaign pages platform and get people started.
Blogs
For those of you who are thinking about ways you can promote your business as well as help support and grow the CiviCRM community :-) ...
Our idea is that a Room Booking Module would be a fantastic addition to CiviCRM.
Join us on 19 October 2011 in Montreal (QC, Canada) for a meetup on the state of the fr_CA CiviCRM translation. Location: at the Brulerie Saint-Denis (near the Berri-UQAM metro station) starting at 19h (7 PM).
Texting - sending short messages via sms to cell phones is a powerful but untapped tool for community organizing. Recent Pew Internet studies have shown that young people of color use texting far more than other demographic groups, and increasingly access the internet and communicate solely through their mobile devices. Given this, texting has tremendous potential to help community organizing groups in the US communicate with their members.
There will be a CiviCRM Euro code sprint in The Netherlands from 12 - 16 December 2011, and you can register here
The idea is to have as many community members present so we can achieve lots and make all of us happy!
For Joomla users out there, you may be interested in a few new and updated 3rd party extensions that provide integration with CiviCRM. A semi-complete list of available extensions with their descriptions can be found here: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Joomla%21+Extensions+for+CiviCRM+%283rd+party%29
Of particular interest are a few for Joomla 1.6+ users:
CiviCRM 3.4.x and 4.0.x introduced API v3, a more consistent set of interfaces for integrating with CiviCRM using PHP, Smarty, Javascript, and REST. Building on this consistent core API, recent CiviCRM updates have introduced even more ways to manipulate your data -- such as chaining and CSV batch importing.
Thus, functions implemented according to the API v3 conventions can be invoked several different ways. If you would like to leverage this infrastructure for use with a new or customized API call, then download the latest release. With 3.4.6/4.0.6, external developers can expose API functions for new entities, new actions, and even generic actions.
As a freelancer, here are a few notes and an overview on how I solved a client's contacts consolidation when the data came from external sources:
My Use Case - Client had ongoing events and conferences over several years which meant there were databases and mailing lists all over the place (many of which had crossover). - I set up ongoing JSON exports of the contact data from the external sites, which could be queried by date range to get the latest changes.
