Last week during CiviCon in London I introduced CiviCooP to the audience. CiviCooP is a Dutch cooperative organisation (“coöperatieve CiviCooP UA”) which aims to help CiviCRM customers (mainly NGOs) with all aspects of CiviCRM.
In this blog my aim is to explain to you what CiviCooP is about, its roots and what might be in it for you. What are we about? Well, to be able to explain this I have to tell you a little about our roots. So let me take you back to a nice Thai restaurant about a year ago. Around the table Xavier Dutoit, Erik Brouwer and Erik Hommel. All active CiviCRM community members supporting NGOs with their CiviCRM implementations.
The topic of discussion: how are we going to meet the growing demand for CiviCRM and offer better support on a daily basis to our customers? How are we going to work together in a way that ensures we keep our individuality and independence whilst at the same time providing one contact point for our customers? How do we marry the strength of our community to the world of Service Level Agreements? How do we enable ourselves to do larger projects and make sure we can be in our flow as much as possible? How do we make the most of our combined talents? And we here should not read just us three but we as in the individuals and smaller companies that mainly form our community.
In the end we decided to form a Dutch cooperation .This is an organisational unit in the Dutch company regulations that dates back to the time when farmers combined forces to sell milk to the big factories. As a co-operation CiviCooP has members, and is directed by a board elected by the members. We do not believe CiviCooP should make a profit, but serve as a cost-based machinery to allow us all to work together. The founding members are Barnworks (web application development as background), Bosqom (helpdesk, support and hosting)) en EE-atWork (implementation, project management, active CiviCRM community members since 2009). We have now been working together in CiviCooP for a couple of months and already experienced that our support and continuity can make a difference in getting new organisations to use CiviCRM.
So what can CiviCooP do for organisations using or interested in CiviCRM?
- We can help you in the selection process by showing you CiviCRM, answering your questions and even manage your selection process with you
- We can help you to implement CiviCRM with project support and management, training, functional consultancy, data migration, configuration and hosting
- We can help you to customize CiviCRM with configuration, extension development and specific data manipulation
- We can help you use CiviCRM to support your daily processes with a helpdesk, training, hosting and functional support
In short, we do CiviCRM in all flavours. We offer you continuity as we combine the best of our members!
So what can CiviCooP do for implementers and developers?
- We can help you to resource or manage larger projects. You can take the lead or we can, whatever you and your customer prefers
- We can help you by providing helpdesk support to your customer so there is always someone answering the phone and helping the customer with the generic CiviCRM questions. And contact you for the specific ones
- You can become a member. On top of the two points mentioned above as a member you can also join in the combination of our marketing forces and help direct the future of CiviCooP. We still need to check what the legal implications of having members from foreign countries are, but please tell us if you are interested
As mentioned, CiviCooP is not out to make a profit. You will be asked for a contribution towards costs. The expenses will be reported to all members once a year, and if there are any leftovers they will be donated to the running of the CiviCRM core team.
Our common characteristics
We do believe that our members share a common attitude, some core values, our DNA if you like:
- We want to earn our daily bread but we also want to make the world a better place. Profit is important, but so is impact!
- We like operating in the world of NGOs, charities and non-profit organisations and want to give them value for their money
- We love to help
- We like sharing and believe we can only grow and prosper by doing so
- We believe we should focus on each others talents and make sure we are in our flow as much as possible
- We believe we need to support continuous change with Agile project management for development but also for implementation and optimisation projects
- We want to be active members of the CiviCRM community
- We believe CiviCRM is the best option for CRM in the third sector.
So that is CiviCooP, happy to meet you! We would love to hear your thoughts on all sort of things that we are still concerned about like how do we keep a reasonable quality level, how do we ensure that a project does a sound hand-over to the helpdesk, how do we cope with multinational issues and a magnitude of other things, some of them we do not know yet...
Do let us know if you are interested, want to know more or voice your worries, concerns or sparks of energy! Our email is helpdesk@civicoop.org and our website is http://www.civicoop.org
Comments
This is fantastic and I think it addresses many gaps in the current CiviCRM Ecosystem and I'm eager to participate. One note: I often need to source for small issues / bugs rather than large projects. For example, I'm running into trouble with drupal/civicrm sessions and cookies. It is not a big project, may take someone an hour or so, but I find it difficult to source people for that type of work and cannot depend on the community.
I can certainly imagine we would be able to help with smaller issues as well. As you can imagine I would expect that as it is now most of our members are on projects and Matthijs on the helpdesk is still in his earlier CiviCRM days. When his CiviCRM skilss increase or the volume grows so we can put more resources towards the helpdesk......so do give us a try if you run into smaller issues :-)
sounds great erik