Park Circle Film Society is an all-volunteer, 501(c)3 micro-nonprofit in North Charleston, South Carolina, USA. Its mission is to enrich the community through film by:
- Screening independent films,
- Educating the public about the motion picture arts and sciences, and
- Fostering civic engagement and community outreach.
Started in late 2008 by four friends with less than $500 in startup funds, PCFS needed to leverage open source technology from day one. Having no physical office, the entire stack needed to be web-based. In early 2009, we implemented CiviCRM on Drupal to manage contacts, memberships, donations, email marketing, and volunteers.
PCFS currently screens 60-70 times per year to more than 2,000 film fans, plus an annual 2-day shorts festival. No other arts organization in our state manages this level of programming without at least one full-time employee. So CiviCRM's biggest benefit for us is time saved on administration. CiviCRM gives us back 12-16 hours a month that we can instead put toward improving and growing the organization.
The tight integration with Drupal's Views module means that our donors page maintains itself. Automatic membership reminders have helped retention. Membership retention is now even higher with the new multiple reminders feature!
This year we began offering advance sales online. By combining Drupal's Computed Field module with CiviEvent, we have rich content management and reuse, with a transaction engine that ties tickets to Civi contacts. Patrons immediately began buying online rather than calling, freeing us up to solicit donors and event sponsors.
The best part about Civi is seeing it mature alongside PCFS. As revenue increases 30% a year and attendance keeps rising, many of our customizations and workarounds have retired as the product improves. This month we are implementing the GL features, eliminating time spent exporting and manipulating spreadsheets for our accounting app. We'll will also soon implement the new CiviVolunteer module; it will replace custom contact and activity fields (and custom reports) with standard features and volunteer self-service.
