CiviCRM for Client Services Organizations

Earlier this week I had an opportunity to meet with folks at the Glide Foundation in San Francisco. Glide "empowers San Francisco’s poor and disenfranchised to make meaningful changes in their lives to break the cycle of poverty and dependence" by providing an amazing range of programs from meals to housing, health services, employment training and more. The team at Glide is evaluating CRM solutions - with the goal of having a single repository for information about their clients and the services they provide. I gave them a demo of CiviCRM and discussed their needs at a fairly high level. Reviewing CiviCRM features through the prism of a "service providing" organization was interesting. The customizable Activity tracking, the new Case Management functionality, the easy to implement custom fields, and the mapping integration all jumped out as strengths relative to Glide's use cases. On the flip side, the limitations in built-in searches and the lack of "formal reporting" (especially management statistics with cool charts and graphs...) were areas of relative weakness. Michelle Murrain at NOSI (Nonprofit Open Source Initiative) has kicked off a case management "advisory team" to collect feedback on CiviCRM's case management functionality. I suspect this initiative will help drive the project towards becoming a more effective tool for service / program based non-profits and NGO's.