CiviCRM Aggregated Reviews

I set up a install of CiviCRM on a WordPress site once. I’m not a very techie guy, and I managed it, so I. Sure you could too. Hard to do, but worth it for the experience and cost savings.
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If you’ve got I.T. guys; I recommend the opensource CiviCRM. You can host your own server for the cost of electricity, and there’s a whole pile of cloud hosting services out there that aren’t anywhere near the cost of something like Salesforce .
We’ve been using it about 2 years with 6k constituency and the thing finds a new way to impress me everyday!
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CiviCRM is a free, open source CRM tool with a bunch of different plugins that my organization uses. Worth a look
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I implemented civicrm on azure for our nonprofit after investigating the techsoup options. This took extreme expertise and hair pulling. My second option was little green light. This was to solve donor management. It sounds like you want to solve more than just engagement with this which is going to create a huge cost proposition.
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As someone who has a background in software development and currently administers a case management system for a social work agency, any information you’d get here won’t be near as useful as walking into your nearest social work agency and finding out what they currently use and why they dislike it. There is an open source system that can do case managment (civicrm) but having tried it I can say it’s a lot of work and requires someone on staff with some technical nohow, a rare skill set in the social work field
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CiviCRM is web-based software used by a diverse range of organisations, particularly not-for-profit organizations (nonprofits and civic sector organizations).
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If you are interested in a free and open source platform developed by a nonprofit group of good people checkout CiviCRM. Works with Drupal, Wordpress, or Joomla.
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GNU Health comes to mind. CiviCRM helps nonprofits spread information.
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I would avoid CiviCRM and Salesforce . While they may be available at no cost, there is a significant amount of setup and upkeep required in order to get the most out of them.
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It’s a bit dated, but CiviCRM supports events and ticketing.
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CiviCRM may be worth looking at. It’s not particularly any more complex than any other CRM, and if you have the skills in house to install and manage it, you can get running for the cost of your time.
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If I had to pick one to use, it would be CiviCRM. I am not in charge of that at my workplace. I know people that do use it and they like the community surrounding it, which I have never heard from our CRM software. From what I gather, Drupal parts can link together if you are familiar with Drupal.
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Unfortunately there’s no true PHP framework in place – this project started in ~2004, when the webdev world was very different. There’s some Symfony components in the mix now, but one wouldn’t say CiviCRM is built on it.
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We use civicrm. Made for public and nonprofit. Free! You can host it yourself of pay for hosting (we use civihosting).
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Civicrm is an opensource product, so it’s completely free, no cost ever. However you are completely on your own when it comes to hosting and managing it. If you have a very technically savvy staff, it may be the perfect solution…but in my experience most organizations don’t. The UI is also very clunky and difficult to work with (fixing this is one of their roadmap goals, but it’s hard to say when that will happen due to the scope of such a change as well as the way open source software gets developed). This is the biggest drawback (for me) when it comes to CiviCRM. I have seen first hand how dramatic changes are possible with an organization when you make the process / data management faster and easier.
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Another note, CiviCRM looks great, and sure, people should give it a try-but don’t expect that free or cheap works for everyone. If it does-great! That’s awesome, and definitely you should always be looking for better and/or cheaper options, but sometimes things cost-and while I am a huge, huge fan of open source software (like CiviCRM) that doesn’t make it free to use, maintain, etc. You always have to consider TCO-which includes training, ease of use, data portability, etc.
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CiviCRM is the tool of choice here. Excellent, welcoming community too, a very active project.
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Also, CiviCRM is a resource hog.
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CiviCRM is only exposed to the public for online giving, and I use it as my marketing tool. It is mostly a donor management system for me, tracking who has given what. There was no need to customize it for our use case. If you want to get something custom, your best bet would be Salesforce .
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I host civicrm on azure which also happens to be free. Microsoft.com/nonprofit. Customized one line of code to use office365 smtp. All in took me 25 hours to learn and implement myself.
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Civi is not exactly light weight. Depends a lot on the size of your data, what you ask it to do for you and how much capacity there is on your current server. It’s also hard to process credit cards with it in a secure fashion. From a security point of view I would recommend it be hosted separately. There are free hosting options for it on azure.
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Warning, take the following with a grain of salt, I am a vendor in the non-profit crm space:
You can self-host CiviCRM, that requires some technical ability, but the increases in costs (from hosting the platform) will likely be negligible.
Customization can get pricey depending on how complex you need to get and also put you in a position where regular maintenance is also required (if the system gets complex enough).
I would only recommend Civi to organizations who’s staff track above average for technical ability.
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I’m not using it, I actually work at a vendor in the space. CiviCRM more or less has the common issues and strengths you’ll see with any open source application.
It can be tricky to setup / require advanced technical knowledge to run, but if you organization is pretty savvy when it comes to technology, it probably won’t be a problem, and in fact might be the perfect choice.
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We’re using CiviCRM at the Wikimedia Foundation to store all our donor information. We’ve had to do some work to get certain parts working at scale, but overall I’d definitely recommend it
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CiviCRM is an opensource crm focused on non-profits.
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CiviCRM for best open source if that’s the route you want to go. Very supportive community!
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We’re also currently using CiviCRM and Mailchimp. I’ve heard rumblings that there’s an integration (https://civicrm.org/extensions/mailchimp-civicrm-integration), but we haven’t implemented it, so we have to do everything manually. We update our Master List fairly frequently and segment/tag from there depending on the communication opt-ins and -outs of members. There are a lot of issues with doing it this way, the main being that when people opt-out via MC’s unsubscribe, their member record in Civi remains the same. If they ever wanted to opt back in to a communication, well, MC has already marked them as do-not-contact.
Without knowing anything about the integration, I have to think a lot of how/if it works depends on how you’ve built your database and the logic of how communication preferences are written.
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I work as the IT tech for a non-profit and am currently working on a CiviCRM deployment for my own company. Our second, actually.
Whatever solution you adopt, the most important thing is staff training and adoption. Not doing that properly is what spoiled our first deployment a few years ago.
If you’re hosting Civi on your own hardware or with a non-specialist web host, then you’ll absolutely need someone with technical aptitude, though not necessarily any specific knowledge, and the willingness to learn. If you don’t have that you might want to go with a specialist host who can handle a lot of the ‘back end’ stuff and offer expertise, as we have for our new deployment. Of course that adds extra cost. Even then you’re still going to need someone who can get to grips with the system, but isn’t that true of everything.
As for whether Civi is the right choice, it depends on what you do. It’s targeting non-profits and is free of the sales-oriented approach and jargon that many commercial CRMs have, but then it’s not the only non-profit-oriented CRM around now. For us our main operation is providing free services to clients and that’s something that Civi is really well oriented towards, being able to easily record their personal details and then schedule them in for the services and record their attendance. Sounds like basic stuff but I tried another CRM, I shan’t name it, that outright lacked the ability to book a person for an appointment. It also handles data on large numbers of people, as in tens of thousands, pretty well. (Imports take hours to process though). But I can’t speak for whether it’s any good at getting donations from people, we’re government funded.
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