CiviCRM is an open source CRM (constituent relationship management) system that expands the functionality of your website in many different ways. It’s built specifically for nonprofits, so you won’t find yourself having to try to shoehorn your organizational workflow into a business-oriented model (as some find themselves doing when using Salesforce or similar CRMs).
Even better, it’s built to be extremely flexible and customizable: you can create custom fields, location types, contact sub-types, relationship types, financial types… and more, all customized to your nonprofit’s specific needs. There are no hard-coded limits on the numbers of contacts you can store - and likewise, no arbitrary limits or thresholds that trigger a higher monthly fee. (We've heard horror stories of groups that start out with - for example - a "Nonprofit Success Pack" on Salesforce and then when they outgrow it find themselves trapped in what turns out to be a very expensive system, or wanting to expand functionality with "apps" that end up unexpectedly costing hundreds of dollars a month. Here's one example that was shared publicly.)
If your organization is storing data in many different places (“data silos”), you can imagine the benefit of having an accessible, centralized place to store information: no more maintaining multiple spreadsheets and databases to track your constituents. No more updating information in one place only to find out the contact is also being tracked in a different location with inconsistent, unreliable data. No more donations in one system, event registrations in another, and email lists in a third location. When you (or the contact themselves, if you allow it) updates the information, it’s updated across the board. When you view a contact, you can see at a glance their donation history, a record of their attendance for your events, their membership status, and more.
Privacy is always a concern, especially of late with GDPR and various high profile privacy breaches by third party companies. Using CiviCRM, you can fully own your data and store it on your own server and under your privacy policy, rather than off-loading it to third party systems with their own privacy policies.
Though the software is open source and available without charge, there can be costs associated with CiviCRM, from hosting fees to hiring consultants or developers who can help you set up, configure, and maintain the installation or import historical data from another system. In the meantime, instead of these costs being sunk into a proprietary profit-based system, they go towards deepening a sharing, educational, empowering economy that can benefit other nonprofits as well.
Core Components
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CRM: Track contact addresses, demographics, relationships with other contacts, activities with your organization, and custom fields you’ve set up. Use groups, tags, and saved searches to categorize your contacts. A powerful API allows developers to do more extensive integrations and customizations if the need is there.
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Events: Track attendance to past events, set up events that allow registration (with or without payment)
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Memberships: Track membership status and allow membership registration and renewal (with or without payment)
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Donations: Track donation/contribution history and create as many customized donation pages as needed. Activate peer-to-peer fundraising pages.
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Mailings: Send email to contacts in certain groups or to subsets based on filters/searches. Allow people to sign up to mailing lists while verifying/updating their contact information. Use special links in your emails to prepopulate the forms on your site with the contact’s information and link it directly to their record.
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Payment gateways: Connect directly to your payment gateway of choice with no additional middle layer that adds an additional fee to the financial transaction, putting more of the donor’s money in your organization’s bank account. Change your payment processor if needed without having to change or update your entire CRM.
New and Coming Soon
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Shoreditch: The functionality of CiviCRM is always improving, but the user interface has not had an overhaul in a long time. The dated interface is about to be replaced by a clean new theme called Shoreditch.
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Contact Layout Editor: You can now customize the contact display pages much more easily, reording and adding your custom fields in the places you need them on the page. "With this extension you can take full control of the contact summary screen; rearranging and renaming blocks, as well as designing your own blocks by dragging & dropping fields. You can choose which layouts are shown to certain users, and design custom layouts for each contact type."
Contributed Extensions of Note
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DIY Forms: Use Backdrop or Drupal’s powerful Webform module to push data directly to your CRM database. Allow multiple contacts to be added/edited from a single form, including relationships between them.
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Volunteers: Use CiviVolunteer to manage your volunteers.
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Extended Reports: Get more detailed reports at your fingertips.
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Drag and drop email builder: Integrate the Mosaico library into your mailings to provide more of a drag and drop interface.
Examples of integrations with the website
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Private members area/intranet: Sync membership or group status from CiviCRM to a role on the website, allowing access to private information for certain contacts.
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Member directory with filters: Pull specific contact information (e.g. current members) into a searchable directory on your site that updates on the fly based on data in CiviCRM.
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DIY updates: Allow contacts to update their own information and avoid manual entry of hand-written or emailed changes. Use de-duplication rules to match contacts, allow logged in users to update their own info and/or send special customized links in an email to pre-populate the form with the contact’s information and link it directly to their record (whether they are logged in or not).
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Mailing list signup: Add a mailing list signup option on contact forms.
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Create user accounts: Allow users to register for an account on your website while also capturing their information in CiviCRM.
The CiviCRM community is interested in educating and empowering users of all kinds. Take note of the free online manuals for users, administrators and developers, as well as the Q&A forum where you can search, ask and answer questions related to CiviCRM. Please also feel free to contact us if you have any questions or need any support.
