CiviCRM is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution that could be easily integrated with the CMS of your choice such as Drupal, Joomla, or WordPress. It’s specifically designed for the needs of non-profit, non-governmental, and advocacy groups, and serves as an association management system. CiviCRM is the reference in this field, an easy to use web-based, open source, and powered by PHP.
CiviCRM is designed to manage information about an organization’s donors, members, event registrants, subscribers, grant application seekers and funders, and case contacts. Volunteers, activists, voters as well as more general sorts of business contacts such as employees, clients, or vendors can be managed using CiviCRM.
The project is extensively documented and available under a GNU AGPL 3 license. The official CiviCRM book is available for free : CiviCRM user and administrator guide (You can download the ePub version). In addition there are at least two other books from Packt Publishing : Using CiviCRM and CiviCRM Cookbook.
CiviCRM out-of-the-box functionalities can be extended with extensions and modules, provided in the form of CiviCRM-native extensions, independent from CMS plaform, or CMS-native modules that are installed as modules for Drupal, Joomla! or WordPress.
Many known NPOs and NGOs are using CiviCRM such as the Free Software Foundation, Amnesty International, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Global Awakening, Voluntary Action Westminster, Democracy International e.V., and others. Making this ten years old piece of PHP code a reference for Non-Profit organizations.
CiviCRM not only cut cost of CRM implementation for Non-Profit, but also give them freedom ! That’s what you can read for example in the Capitol Page Alumni Association case study :
“Perhaps more import than price is the freedom offered by open source software – CiviCRM 4.1 is completely without fees and the Association’s data lives in an environment unaffected by corporate buyouts and changes in terms of service. The Capitol Page Association also enjoyes the integration CiviCRM offers with their website CMS, WordPress, which is also open source.”
To get started you can to evaluate your CRM needs, check the primary CiviCRM features, Identify the constituents, identify specific inefficiencies, enumerate the specific benefits, then finally get the software and install it on your own servers or locally for testing.
You may also contact one of the CiviCRM ambassadors, who are volunteers who have offered to share their experiences with CiviCRM. They may be able to help you evaluate whether CiviCRM is a good fit for your organization by answering questions about why they chose and how they use CiviCRM.
