Andrew Perry demonstrated a free and open-source product called CiviCRM at the Connecting Up conference. It’s a customer relationshop management tool that you can install on your own webspace; and if you use either Drupal or Joomla to run your website, then CiviCRM can integrate with it.
CiviCRM helps you manage your relationships with donors and supporters, sign up people to attend your events, run your memberships and handle your email newsletters and other communications. Lots of nonprofits are using it and I can see why, it has a lot of very useful features.
Of course, free doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no cost. Installing and using applications like this can take a substantial chunk of staff time. You might need to pay someone or find a tech volunter to install CiviCRM for you. I recently agreed to volunteer for a UK charity to help them install Drupal and CiviCRM. But we hit problems because the correct version of PHP wasn’t installed on their host’s server; then there was an FTP permissions problem! But the good news is that once we resolve all these issues and get it installed, it should be easy to use and give the charity some really useful tools. I’m looking forward to seeing CiviCRM in action.
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- Presentation: Planning your Non-Profit’s Website Today at the Connecting Up 2008 conference I gave a presentation about...
It was good meeting you Jason at the Connecting Up conference. Thanks for the lessons you shared in this article.
BFN
Samir
Samir El-Sabagh
on May 22nd, 2008