CiviCRM

I've played with it (it's like Salesforce.com; get a trail account there if you want to get the experience of it without installing it yourself). It's a big system that (currently) takes many hours to set up properly, plus training and maintenance. Perhaps there would be a way to cut that down but I haven't looked (i.e. the equivalent of a distribution for CiviCRM).

It might be useful for hubs to track the key people of each transition community but I think it's overkill for regular communities. In my view, they don't have the resources to track each member in the way a Customer/Contact Relationship Management tool enables and requires for it to be useful. Hubs are more likely to have the human resources to make CiviCRM work.

However, whatever we do won't preclude people from installing it themselves.

Hi again,

Have had a quick read of the content and requirements here and thought it was worth sharing a bit more on how I think CiviCRM could help here. Hope that it is useful in some way.

I think one question you need to ask is about the extent to which the data you are collecting is focused on contacts as opposed to content. When it is just content, then Drupal is the obvious answer. As you move toward contact data, Civi can start to play an important / useful role (side by side with Drupal).

I had a quick look over your 1.0 features draft and the two parts that stood out as Civi territory were

1. Event registration (integrate with Event Brite?)
2. Newsletter integration (MailChimp/Constant Contact)

Civi offers decent solutions for both of these and would offer you an alternative that avoids the hosted options you've added in brackets. I think the same hosted vs. OS arguments apply here as the ones I saw about Ning vs. Drupal on a couple of these discussions.

Another parameter is how much of your interaction is distributed, and how much is centralised. Civi is more at home for those tasks when there is a degree of centralised admin, e.g. announce only mailing lists, organised administered / paid for events, memberships, fundraising and so on. Having said that, in all of these tasks, it does allow/encourage people to as much work as possible for you to reduce the admin burden on the central team.

Another thing to consider is that CiviCRM contacts don't have to be drupal users or even on the web. So you can use it to keep track of interactions that don't happen online, e.g. Jo Bloggs came to the TT outreach, is interested in receiving info about water purification, but doesn't have acccess to email, isn't online and only wants to be phoned or receive paper mailings. Similarly email newsletter sign up and event registration don't require a user account, etc.

You are right Andre, it is a big system that requires effort to set up properly, but if it matches your use case then the effort is worth it.

OK then, enough from me! Not trying to convince you to use something that doesn't apply to your use case. Please see this as an offer of help to anyone that does want to add CiviCRM to their mix.

Michael

In what ways does Civi help manage contacts that cant/dont want an online presence? This is an important consideration for Transition

Email / Drupal account is not a requirement to add a contact into CiviCRM. You could just enter their name (to put it formally: (first_name AND last_name) OR email). Of course you'd most likely want to add some alternative contact details, phone, postal address, etc. if you had them and wanted to contact them again.

"Similarly email newsletter sign up and event registration don't require a user account, etc." - as in that they can just enter an email address only and sign up for those things, rather than create a full account with more settings?

Most processes in CiviCRM have an offline and online method:

The minimun required for online event registration or newsletter sign up is an email address. You can always configure civicrm to ask for (required or optional) more information as part of online event sign up, e.g. phone number / address / anything else you want.

Civi also has an offline interface that can be used to track interactions (event registration and attendence, membership, money donated, etc) that happen in the real world. So if someone donates to you via cash or cheque at a fundraiser you can record this against their record manually (if they did it online it would be automatically recorded).