Hello CiviCRM community! We’re the Tor Project, long-time users of CiviCRM, and recently we shared a post on our own blog about how CiviCRM helps advance our goals as a nonprofit and our shared commitment to open source software. We also wanted to share some of the overlapping insights with the CiviCRM community.
At the Tor Project, our mission is to advance human rights and freedoms through open source anonymity and privacy technology. Privacy is ultimately about choice—the choice to share information when and how you want. And making informed choices requires information! That’s why as a privacy organization, we practice organizational transparency. People can do their research and choose to use Tor—or donate to the Tor Project—after they have learned about how we build Tor and manage donations to our organization.
Why CiviCRM at the Tor Project?
Since 2013, the Tor Project has been using CiviCRM as part of our stack to accept donations, manage donor profiles, and facilitate donor communications. As the only true open source CRM, CiviCRM and the Tor Project share a commitment to open and transparent technology. Choosing open source technology like CiviCRM allows us to fully control our systems and securely handle supporter personal information. This approach minimizes the risk of a system hack and prevents third-parties from accessing our data.
We integrate CiviCRM with our self-hosted Drupal CMS, providing a robust and flexible platform for managing donor data. Our servers run Debian GNU/Linux and are protected using multiple layers of authentication. To reduce exposure of the CiviCRM API as much as possible, the donation web front-end only communicates with the CiviCRM back-end using a custom Redis key-value store via an encrypted tunnel, instead of connecting to the API directly over the Internet.
As an open source organization, we're committed to collaborating with the CiviCRM community to improve open source tools like CiviCRM, making it more effective and user-friendly for everyone. Our collaboration with the community has led to several notable improvements, including:
- CiviCRM Standalone: We expressed interest in running CiviCRM without a CMS, which motivated the project to prioritize this feature and make it a key part of CiviCRM 6.0.
- Flexible Premiums: We contributed patches to allow perk options to have flexible key/value, making it easier to track items like T-shirt sizes.
- Usability Enhancements: We provide regular feedback on the usability of CiviCRM, resulting in small but significant improvements. For example, a small change to the "View Contribution" page helps improve user experience.
By actively participating in the development of open source technology, we've ensured that our needs are addressed and that the platform continues to evolve to meet the demands of users like us.
This collaborative approach has allowed us to shape the future of CiviCRM, making it a more effective and user-friendly technology.
Open source community = a better world
Tor is more than just a technology. It is a labor of love produced by an international community of people devoted to human rights. Those values mean we contribute to the open source world around us.
Together with the CiviCRM community and many others, we’re creating an alternative set of tools that give people and nonprofits agency and control in our interactions with the digital world.
We recently re-designed our donation page, donate.torproject.org, and your help and uplifting some of our patches made that possible. Thank you CiviCRM community for allowing nonprofits like the Tor Project to accept donations on our own terms!
