Blogs

We thought it would be good to look back over 2014, highlight some of what we've achieved together, and the lessons we've learned, and use these as the basis of some priorities for 2015. A wise person once said "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", and while I agree with the sentiment, it is kind of gloomy!

An interview with the Denver Office of Strategic Partnerships

The Denver Office of Strategic Partnerships (DOSP) was founded to serve as a bridge between the City of Denver and the non-profit sector.  The agency focuses on building individual skills and tools for non-profit and City agency staff in order to encourage the creation of cross-sector partnerships.  Cividesk recently spoke with Miriam Pena, director of the DOSP and Jason Salas, who handles marketing, media and communications within the organization about their experiences implementing and using CiviCRM.

Ginkgo Street Labs is pleased to announce a free webinar on using CiviCRM for a managing a volunteer program successfully. As the developers of the CiviVolunteer extension, we will show you how it extends the core functionality of CiviCRM through all stages of your program. Frank J. Gómez, Principal & Developer, and Roshani Kothari, Director of Strategy & Engagement, will share with you how large and small volunteer programs are being managed using CiviVolunteer. 

The team is super excited to announce that the third alpha release of CiviCRM 4.6 is now available for downloading AND you can try it out on the 4.6 sandbox site!

The release of CiviCRM 4.6 marks a watershed moment for integration with WordPress. Read on for a guide to what's new and what you can do with these cool new features.

CiviCRM 4.6 opens a world of new possibilities for developers and administrators of WordPress-based systems. CiviCRM administrators will be happy to hear that they can now reliably use shortcodes in both static pages and chronological posts. CiviCRM content inserted via a shortcode can even appear in blog archives now. For developers, the big news is that for the first time, multiple plugins can receive callbacks from CiviCRM's hook system. What this means is that WordPress developers can now begin building an ecosystem of plugins to rival the ecosystem of Drupal modules.

Do you use CiviCRM for contributions, pledges, and related financial data? Does your organization use the financial reports in CiviCRM? Does your organization export data from CiviCRM to your general ledger? Or do you want to start doing some of these things?  If so, your input is needed on CiviAccounts.  (You do not need to be a CPA to give input, but having a general understanding of how CiviCRM financial areas work currently is helpful)  

This week Jaap and me were working on the first CiviRules sprint, funded by MAF Norge. As you have problably read (and if not you should :-) in Jaap's earlier blog post he has been working on API's to send Emails, SMS and PDF letters. In the meantime I have created a first database scheme for CiviRules, hacked some basic DAO's and BAO's together and started working on the first forms. Preview of the screen included :-)

At Ginkgo Street Labs, we’re on a mission to improve CiviCRM to better meet users’ growing and changing needs. We have many ways that we gather data on those needs, most recently through the CiviVolunteer Survey, in which we asked how organizations are managing their volunteer programs. To encourage participation in the survey, we raffled four $25 Amazon gift certificates.

This week we have been working for MAF Norway to automate the sending of SMS, E-mail and PDF creation. What we have done in the past for them is that we created a Trigger/Action module to automate their donor journeys. The actions in the trigger/action module are API calls. But what was missing up-to-today was to functionality to send e-mail, or to create a PDF Letter or send an SMS by invoking an API Call.