Ruta Civica (Civic Route) is a Mexican volunteer based organization working in civic education and promoting citizen participation in public affairs. Through different campaigns, our mission is to develop the involvement of citizens in the making of the Constitution and laws for Mexico City and its urban planning. Since land zoning, construction and public works decisions have to pursue the public interest. We organize and train neighborhood committees and groups, as well as provide independent technical expert advice on urban and sustainability projects. We also work in educating, preventing and denouncing corruption.
Even if we recently incorporated as a formal nonprofit organization in 2015, our urban activism and coalitions go back to 2010. We believe that having fun and being creative can boost the messages of technical analysis and data. We are slowly building an urban constituency that can promote large systemic reforms for an inclusive and sustainable city.
Cividesk offered their help as part of their Giving Back program. This program is targeted at ‘volunteer-run non-profit organizations providing free and secular services to the underprivileged’, and provides these organizations with pro-bono services. Cividesk installed and configured a CiviCRM instance to be used by Ruta Civica and offers continued hosting and support.
Mónica Tapia, Director and CiviCRM Ambassador in Mexico explained: “We had previously used CiviCRM, but through their Giving Back program Cividesk provides us with a more stable hosting platform and full support which brings us quicker responses to our problems. The training materials have helped us better organize our contacts and train our internal users and interns. Our small donor database is now up and running and hopefully it will grow rapidly with event and fundraising efforts. Cividesk provides us as well with a reliable email delivery service that helps us communicate with our constituency.
Cividesk team has also been very flexible and adaptive to our local needs like installing Wordpress and CiviCRM in the Spanish version and configuring different payment processors. We still have sometime the challenge of the language barrier between interns and Cividesk support but Cividesk always put great effort into providing us with the help we need.
Our next step is the integration of the first native Mexican payment processor with CiviCRM: Banwire, an iATS partner. We hope these extra efforts will help build a CiviCRM community in Mexico and we see Cividesk as a good partner for supporting this initiative”.
