CiviCRM is an open source freely available CRM, created and supported by a passionate community of users and developers from around the world who contribute their time and money to CiviCRM. Their contributions are what CiviCRM work, and there would be no CiviCRM without them (see below for more details on how our community contributes to CiviCRM). To help keep this amazing community of contributors going, there are some core activities that we need to fund. If your organisation benefits from CiviCRM, please support our core activities, which help us:
- develop a flexible and stable core CiviCRM to which our community can contributue
- ensure the fantastic community contributions find their way back into CiviCRM
- release two new versions of CiviCRM per year, packed with new functionality that your organisation can put to use
- run CiviCRM's infrastructure (the website, the servers, and so on) that allows us to co-ordinate the community
- grow and increase the involvement of our community, both online and in the real world
Here are the recommended ways to support our core activities, designed to cater for the different types of organisations and individuals in our community:
- Organisations that provide CiviCRM services, or CiviCRM related technologies should join our partner program
- Organisations that use CiviCRM to support their mission should join our member program
Please join us and help CiviCRM thrive!
And if you have already 'got with the program', please encourage others to do the same as well. Recommendations from peers are very powerul, and referring others to the member and partner program is a great way to help CiviCRM grow even more. So let everyone know why you joined, and let them know why they should too.
As well as the partner program and the member program, there are many other ways in which you can contribute to CiviCRM.
We are always on the look out for organisations that would like to partner with us and often work together with organisations where we share similar goals. If you would like to sponsor the development of functionality within CiviCRM, or support our work over a longer period of time, please get get in touch and we can talk further.
If you would like to see some functionality in CiviCRM, have the money to part fund its development and would like to share development costs with other organisations, consider creating a make it happen campaign.
And if none of the above sound right for you, why not consider a monthly contribution to support our work.
How does the community contribute to CiviCRM?
CiviCRM is freely available for you to download - but it isn't free to write - it takes time and resources, and a lot of these come from our community. Here's how it works in a nutshell.
1 |
Someone writes some code |
Often they'll get paid to write that code. Sometimes, they are doing it for free. Regardless, they are writing it, because it helps their organisation do something with CiviCRM - they are scratching their own itch. |
2 |
Someone shares their code |
Once they're finished, they have a choice: they can keep that code to themselves, or they can share it with the world. We don't *force* anyone to share their code - that would be quite hard since we don't have an angry mob to do the enforcing. That said, we are quite good at arm twisting! And even when we don't twist arms there are 1,000s of people that choose to share their code for fame, glory, financial gain, or the good of the world. |
3 |
CiviCRM gets better |
When people share their code, we add it to CivICRM. Twice a year, we gather up these improvements and release a new version of CiviCRM. And what happens when you collect the itches of a thousand developers (ew!)? You get a CRM that meets the needs of thousands of organisations. |
So there you have the basics, but it doesn't stop there. We apply similar open source principles to our documentation, our support forums, our meet ups, our conferences, and on and on. You name it, we'll try and open source it. Your contributions help us support these processes and help us grow the community.
