There are lots of success stories about CiviCRM, nearly all of which are provided by CiviCRM partners. That makes sense as they are the experts at implementing, customizing and managing CiviCRM for organizations all over the world.
But there’s another source of success stories that mostly goes undocumented… until now.
Enter Hanna of Danske Venner af Combatants for Peace, a new, small NPO that recently formed in Denmark.
Like many NPOs, Hanna recognized quickly that she needed something more than a spreadsheet to manage all of the related information associated with her organization.
New to CRMs, she undertook some research and ultimately landed on CiviCRM Spark as the CRM of choice. It seemed to fit what she was looking for from a feature standpoint as well as aligned with the organization’s values around privacy, data sovereignty and collaboration.
Like many that jump into any CRM for the first time, Hanna struggled to understand where to begin and how best to optimize her use of CiviCRM Spark. Frustration set in and after a while, she decided to look at other options.
In the process of working with CiviCRM Spark, however, she learned quite a bit and was better prepared to evaluate CRMs. The result?
She quickly understood that while many CRMs are more polished than CiviCRM, all of them lack the flexibility and features needed to meet her requirements. She knew where she needed to be and recommitted to mastering CiviCRM.
This time, however, she did two things differently: 1) she downloaded it and installed it into WordPress and 2) she reached out to me with feedback on Spark and an update on her journey with CiviCRM.
I was inspired by her effort and her story.
As a result, I pointed her to a few different resources to help guide her. I also mentioned her story in a marketing team call citing it as “an example of how, when somebody digs into CiviCRM, both the software and the community, they stand to truly harness the power of CiviCRM as a whole.”
Dave Moreton of Circle Interactive was on the call. Impressed with her story as well, he offered to kick in a few hours of free support to help her along the way.
Hanna’s journey hasn’t been easy or quick, but it’s been rewarding in the sense that she has gained a lot of understanding about CRMs and has learned enough about CiviCRM to know that it offers her and her organization a lot of potential.
She continues to reach out occasionally with updates and even recently found a translation issue. In the process of recording a video to show her how to post tickets to Gitlab, I realized that she’d beaten me to it. She’s already posted a few.
From newbie to CiviCRM, to learning how to administer it, to posting tickets to gitlab, all in just a few short months. That reflects the best of our community and contributes back to the project.
Except, Hanna didn’t stop there.
After a few months, her NPO Danske Venner af Combatants for Peace became a member of CiviCRM and now financially supports the project. Each and every organization that relies on CiviCRM… partner, provider, end user or Core Team… no matter which… everyone of us benefits from their support.
The CiviCRM project and community are richer because of Hanna. That is a real community success story!
Hanna's organization is among the .14% of end users that actually give back and fund the project. For more information about how CiviCRM is doing, as a project, check out our monthly snapshot.
