Have you ever heard of CiviCRM?
CiviCRM is a free, libre and open source software constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups. Integration with both Drupal and Joomla! content management systems gives you the tools to connect, communicate and activate your supporters and constituents.
CiviCRM is more than a contact database, it also includes some pretty sweet components:
- civiCASE
Case management for clients and constituents. - civiCONTRIBUTE
Online fundraising and donor management. - civiEVENT
Online event registration and participant tracking. - civiMEMBER
Online signup and membership management. - civiMAIL
Personalized email blasts and newsletters. - civiREPORT
Report generation and template management.
CiviCRM is free and open source, and now CiviCRM is gathering support to add WordPress integration.
WordPress integration will be part of CiviCRM v4.1. The release schedule is on the CiviCRM Roadmap. WordPress is the most popular CMS today. Google Trends indicates that WP’s popularity is growing at a faster rate than the competition. We’ve been getting quite a few inquiries from WP users about CiviCRM integration. One of the main stumbling blocks till recently was WP’s license which was GPL v2 only which is incompatible with AGPL v3. On Jan 15, 2011 they changed the licence to GPL v2 or later thus making it similar to Drupal / Joomla and also compatible with AGPL v3 (which is the license that CiviCRM uses). This is definitely great news for us to see the licensing situation resolved.
If this can gain some traction, this could be really huge. The CiviCRM community is already fairly sizable:
- The CiviCRM package was downloaded over 400,000 times since 2009, and we believe it is installed on more than 5,000 servers.
- The community forum has 11,500 members averaging 80+ posts per week day (as of December 2009).
- Over 100 individuals and consultants have participated in the design and development of CiviCRM.
- Consulting firms from one person shops to multi-million dollar organizations offer CiviCRM-based services.
- Open visibility and community participation in bugs, features and product roadmaps.
You can find out the technical requirements, learn more (and even try it), download CiviCRM, and show your support for WordPress integration on the CiviCRM website.
Have you used CiviCRM?
What do you think about it?
Please, weigh-in!
Dowd says
Hi, I have setup Civi in several churches and Christian organisations in the UK. It is great that it is very flexible and integrates with Drupal very well. There is a blog post at http://civicrm.org/blogs/lindseym/recurring-events-and-attendance-reporting-core-civi-functions by one of the churches I have been working with about some of the frustrations we have been finding using it for churches, but overall it has been very good.
Eric Dye says
Great hearing from you! Thank you for sharing your experience. 😀
Ken says
Does CiviCRM support integrations with social media (Facebook, Twitter etc)?
Eric Dye says
It looks like it has some social media integration: http://civicrm.org/extensions/attentively-integration