Organizations in the civic sector, such as schools, non-profits, and advocacy groups, have enough going on without having to worry about managing donor lists, membership programs, and similar important data. Unfortunately, most of the commercially available relationship management software is typically expensive and not usually very customizable. January’s Project of the Month, CiviCRM, is a fantastic relationship management tool designed to help groups in the civic sector get a handle on the data that’s important to them.
CiviCRM integrates with both Drupal and Joomla to manage website content, fundraising drives, bulk communications client lists, and more. The New York State Senate even uses it to manage its interactions with its constitutes.
The project got its start back in the fall of 2004. “Several of us had worked together developing web-based software for online donations and bulk email targeted at U.S. non-profits. The software was NOT open source and didn’t provide a consolidated view of constituents. We came to the conclusion that there was a need for an open source CRM solution built from the ground up to serve not for profit organizations was desperately needed. Existing CRM solutions were modeled on sales force automation requirements and weren’t easily adapted to the needs of the civic sector,” says Project Lead Dave Greenberg.
Head over to CiviCRM’s featured Project of the Month (POTM) webpage to learn more about this fantastic project. Congratulations to the entire team over at CiviCRM for being chosen as the first POTM of 2011!