DigiActive.org

Tool: CiviCRM for better communication

When a small campaign becomes a permanent organization, there are often difficulties in scaling.  A small group can communicate with supporters through a Google Group, but what if you have multiple constituencies or you want to record information about your supporters that will help you communicate with them effectively? Wouldn’t you like to manage your “relationships” better? Or, be more efficient in sending out appeals and updates? Tap the right quarters when it comes to fund-raising? Know exactly who your potential supporters could be?

Michal Mach is a Polish programmer who co-founded CiviCRM. What’s the project about? Why is it particularly relevant and useful to non-profits?

“CiviCRM is a software for non-profit organisations to manage their contact-data. Information about people, organisations they work with, all kinds of addresses-related information, records of interactions with different people or organisations,” says Mach. It’s basically a CRM (customer relationship management) package for a non-profit.

According to Wikipedia, “CiviCRM is an open source (customer) relationship management (CRM) solution. CiviCRM calls itself an ‘constituent relationship management solution’. It is designed to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups. CiviCRM may be deployed on Drupal and Joomla! content management systems. Both the Drupal and Joomla! professional associations use CiviCRM,”  says the Wikipedia.

It also notes that CiviCRM is also used by many other large NGOs such as Amnesty International, Creative Commons and the Wikimedia Foundation for their fundraising. And there have been also cases of very large record sets being used with one company claiming to have set up CiviCRM with a set of over 3 million constituents .