Blogs

In late 2009, we were looking for a better solution for one of our larger faith-based clients. The AMS and CRMs we investigated were either too expensive or too simplistic.  We had taken a hard look at CiviCRM about a year earlier, but we didn’t think it was ready.  However, with the release of CiviCRM 3.1, CiviCRM was more mature and gave us the flexibility and Drupal integration we needed.  CiviCRM was ready and so were we.

Anyone who has tried to login to their CiviCRM database via their phone knows the feeling: utter helplessness. You would even be forgiven for thinking CiviCRM is actively hostile to the small screen.

With over ten thousand organizations using CiviCRM worldwide, you might think it would be easy to find qualified, experienced people to hire for your job opportunities.  However, it can sometimes be a challenge for job seekers to know if their CiviCRM skills will be of use.

CiviCareers aims to change that.  The site brings together jobs at organizations worldwide who use CiviCRM to track and engage their supporters.  Jobs in fundraising, organizing, event planning, and more—executive and administrative—are available to browse.  Best of all, posting is free and easy.

Busy sites have often encountered problems with deadlocks on the group contact cache. There were no less that 3 different code contributions to mitigate this problem put up for 4.7.8 and a number of other discussions have been going on in JIRA.

About a year ago, IMBA's membership team noticed many of our members were renewing after their expiry date, and often after the "Lapsed" or grace period of two months we have in place. To help accelerate these renewals, our membership team decided to offer a "members only special"—a t-shirt normally reserved for $100 and up memberships for a lower membership fee of $50—if the member renewed as an "Early Bird" i.e. before their expiry date.

Hi Everyone! Thanks for visiting the blog post. I am Pranay (21 | Male | India). I am pursuing my Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and have just completed 4 years of undergraduate education. This is my first time at the prestigious Google Summer of Code programme and I am looking forward to a great FOSS-flavored summer. 

It's been on our agenda for a good while to improve the way that we recognize the contributions people make to CiviCRM. I'm pleased to report that we've made some decent progress on this front.  We now have a way to regularly 'poll' 'sources' for 'tasks' completed by 'contributors' to CiviCRM.

In September last year, the core team started using Slack (a proprietary chat platform) to improve our internal communication and co-ordination. It worked really nicely for us and  coordination and we wanted to role it out more widely, but there were a couple of limitations: the free version of slack has limited history (you can only search and browse the most recent 10k messages) and the full version costs $8 per user per month, which isn't going to work financially for us.

This year seems to have flown by, and it's time to solicit CiviCRM User Summit sessions. If you use CiviCRM at your organization and have a story to tell—how you use a feature, what interesting customization you have, or how you'd like to see CiviCRM improve—you should submit a session. All accepted session leaders from nonprofits attend the conference for free.

The CiviCRM User Summit is in Washington, DC, September 22 and 23. Learn more and register today! (We'll certainly refund you if you submit a selected session.)