Kabissa is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization founded in 1999. Our mission is to help African civil society organizations to put Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to work for the benefit of their communities.
Kabissa's current priority is to support the networking, information sharing and ICT peer learning needs of African civic society organizations. This is done by maintaining an online platform at http://www.kabissa.org with a searchable organization directory, community blog and monthly member newsletter. Kabissa also runs a community forum and organizes webinars. Kabissa works closely with Erik Hommel, their in-house CiviCRM guru who contributes a few volunteer hours a month to Kabissa.
On May 20, 2014, Kabissa organized a roundtable that featured CiviCRM. During this roundtable, Tobias Eigen, Executive Director of Kabissa indicated the three things he likes most about CiviCRM:
1. Provides powerful functionality nonprofits like Kabissa need out of the box, letting us get a lot of our needs met without any programming or customizations. This includes: basic contact management tasks like import/export and categorization etc, as well as tracking activities related to one or groups of contacts, and surprisingly robust tools for donation management, sending out and tracking newsletters, organizing events, and more. It is nice as that it also integrates with Drupal, WordPress and Joomla.
2. It is extendable through plugins and custom code when we do need something new and we have a budget for it. We took advantage of this early; to create a searchable organization directory (e.g.http://kabissa.org/connect/latest and profile pages (e.g. http://civicus.kabissa.org) for our members all using custom code. (going forward we'd like to change this to use new core code that can cover our needs)
3. It is Open Source Software, so improvements made to the core code or plugins are contributed back for the benefit of all, and can be tested by others as well. And it has a great and welcoming community forum where most questions you might have are probably already being discussed!
Comments
Thanks for featuring Kabissa in the CiviCRM Newsletter and in this blog post. Kabissa and CiviCRM go way back so we appreciate the honor.
It is also timely - we are keen to bring more CiviCRM wizards on board as volunteers so if anyone reading this has spare cycles or an interest to join a great and fun volunteer team longer term please contact me ASAP. The next project we are starting up right now is to upgrade our kabissa.org platform (both Drupal and CiviCRM) and also improve our setup by shifting as much of our custom workflows and functionality as possible to core... hopefully without breaking anything! We also are grappling with a database cleanup process at the moment which is a fun challenge for a CiviCRM savvy database wrangler. Erik has created some pretty nifty scripts to semi-automate the process of figuring out who is active and who needs to be contact to update their details, but there is still alot of manual work to do. Beyond that we would very much like to update our newsletter templates, donation forms, event registration forms, and more fully configure CiviCRM's advanced features including the newish CiviVisualize so we are better able to deliver on our mission to connect and empower African civil society organizations - and show our impact while we are at it. Good stuff.
I was not aware that Friends of the Earth International is also using CiviCRM to raise funds for their important Ebola fighting efforts in Liberia. That is great to see and I really hope they are successful - the Ebola situation is really scary and I have friends and colleagues in affected countries that I worry about.
CIVICUS, the other organization besides MSF South Africa that we featured in our roundtable about CiviCRM is actually a very interesting use case and I'm sorry it was not included in the newsletter after all - do take a look at the Kabissa forum post about the roundtable to learn about how CIVICUS uses CiviCRM to power their membership system which is rather sophisticated. They have "Associate" and "Voting" membership levels for both individuals and organizations, and provide signup forms for all of these levels directly on their website - getting this right is hard and they seem to have done so.
Please note that the two stunning photos attributed to Kabissa in the newsletter are actually from Kabissa members. Mozambikes won the Kabissa photo competition (photo on Flickr) with that amazing photo of a cyclist in Mozambique transporting more coal one would think is possible. The Maasai Girls Education Fund is the source of the photo of the Maasai meeting, which they used among many other great photos in an update back in 2010.
As Kabissa's in-house guru as Tobias calls it, I can only say that I am proud to be part of the team and would welcome any CiviCRM community member that wants to help out. Having some additional peeps would be great as we would really like to move to Drupal 7 and CiviCRM 4.x!