CiviCRM financials ......

Don't worry, the body is not as dire as the subject indicates. Just wanted to give folks some background about how we operate and manage to do what we do, and what we need to do to continue delivering an awesome product (or so we think ...) We currently are spread across India (9 developers), Poland (1.5 developers), US (dave) and NZ (lobo). CiviCRM was initially sponsored by a generous grant from the OSI Information Program. This enabled us to start our Polish and India operations. OSI funds helped pay for our Polish and India teams for the first year. In 2006, OSI funded Kabissa to implement CiviCRM in Kabissa and its partner organizations. We've also been supported by an anonymous private foundation for our India and US operations. All our non-profit funding goes via Social Source Foundation, a 501(c)(3) registered in the US. In 2006 we also did a couple of large consulting projects which added significant features into CiviCRM. In this regard, we partnered with Questbridge, a program that links bright, motivated low-income students with educational and scholarship opportunities at some of the nation's best colleges. This was a perfect match, and it enabled us to build a few core features into CiviCRM and meet their needs at the same time. Some of these features include:

• New component model for CiviCRM, allows components to extend search/import/export
• CiviCRM ACL Support
• Batch Update via Profile
• Improvements to Form Builder and Wizard tools
• PDF and XML integration

We will continue to work with Quest in 2007 to meet their needs better. One major focus will be optimizing CiviCRM to perform better under large loads. We also implemented a similar scholarship feature for McConnell Foundation with our friends from CivicActions. These consulting projects raised approximately 50% of our total operating budget. In 2007, we hope to double the number of consulting projects, hence earning at least 80-90% of our operating budget. We try to adhere to a few simple rules when choosing a project

• The project has to add/improve a significant feature of CiviCRM
• The organization has to understand Open Source and CiviCRM licensing / copyright issues
• The project has to be sufficiently large ( > 250 hours development)

So, if you know of organizations and / or consulting projects that meet the above requirements, please do let us know. If you are or know of a foundation interested in sponsoring CiviCRM development, let us know. We will need your help and support to meet our goals in 2007. For details on pricing/proposals, please contact me. lobo