Posted by Isaac777 on January 2, 2014 at 10:06pm
I am about to start work on a nonprofit site and am strongly considering using CIVICRM within that framework. I am looking to this group to see if anyone can share sites that are using it that I can look at and the pluses and minuses you have encountered. Essentially I am looking to convince this is the way to go versus using Microsoft's CRM. I would like to keep everything Druapl if possible
Comments
My Rational...
My Rational for using CiviCRM over Microsoft's CRM is that I use a LAMP stack for my Drupal website's which makes CiviCRM an obvious fit. There are other native Drupal CRM entries available as well (RedHen DrupalCRM) but I feel CiviCRM is a more mature product.
A few pluses are that theming, blocks, views, etc... with CiviCRM are centralized in a Drupal ecosystem. I often tie Events, Membership Rosters, etc... to Drupal content via views and blocks and I can't imagine the hell I would be up against if I were to have to use something that didn't integrate so well.
I've been using CiviCRM for production websites since early 2010 and as with any complex tool there is a learning curve but it has proven a very powerful tool for my client's websites. Following are a few example sites:
CiviCRM will initially install with nothing but a scaffold for you to configure and edit. You'll have to decide what you want it to do and fill in all the blanks. I highly recommend the excellent CiviCRM Cookbook from Packt Publishing. I helped with the technical review and it really is a useful book: http://www.packtpub.com/civicrm-cookbook/book
I use CiviCRM almost
I use CiviCRM almost exclusively for commercial and non-commercial clients and find it's feature set pretty good, it can have some inconsistencies, but so can many other CRM tools.
It's easy to customise and override anything you may need to change and this leads into it's main negative, which is a negative across CRMs generally.
These are off the shelf systems that attempt to fit many people's use cases, don't expect it to work the way you want it to, just because you think it should, plan, plan and plan again and ensure you know exactly what you want to represent and why before diving into any implementation.
I use CiviCRM almost
I use CiviCRM almost exclusively for commercial and non-commercial clients and find it's feature set pretty good, it can have some inconsistencies, but so can many other CRM tools.
It's easy to customise and override anything you may need to change and this leads into it's main negative, which is a negative across CRMs generally.
These are off the shelf systems that attempt to fit many people's use cases, don't expect it to work the way you want it to, just because you think it should, plan, plan and plan again and ensure you know exactly what you want to represent and why before diving into any implementation.
Appreciate the feedback
Thank you so much for the feedback. I'm quite sure it will prove very helpful!
You can review numerous case
You can review numerous case studies at https://civicrm.org/what/casestudies
CiviCRM is a very robust CRM system that integrates well with Drupal. Depending on your requirements, its functionality already exists in various other modules and packages, but CiviCRM's greatest benefit is the integration of the multiple pieces.
We've built multiple non-profit sites with CiviCRM with great functionality - feel free to ask here or ping me offline if you have any specific questions.