We've been offering CiviCRM consulting and hosting on a per-client basis for some time now, and as we have grown, we have started to feel the need for greater automation and consistency in our hosting offerings and contracts. Koumbit is currently in the midst of developing a comprehensive hosted CiviCRM offering, with the support of a few courageous clients.
Blog posts by Gast
Keep up-to-date with blogs from the core team, working groups, developers, users and champions worldwide. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive regular updates by email. We also have an RSS feed.
Good documentation is mission critical for the success of any software project. As a project we essentially have three audiences for our documentation:
Users Site Builders DevelopersAs part of my final year studying Computer Science at uni I'm required to take on a 400 hour project. I've been wanting to create a mobile app for a while now and given that CiviCRM is lacking such a feature I thought it would be a good idea to embark on developing one. Hopefully the end result will be good enough to incorporate into core!
Recently we spent some time cleaning up the code base for Drupal's Views module in CiviCRM. This will be reflected in the 4.1 release of CiviCRM, at this point this was all written for Drupal 7, though should be portable to Drupal 6. There were a couple new features thrown in but much of this will focus on making the code base a little more efficient and easier to read.
The two major tasks were:
I recently completed a conversion of about 8 years of history from a 5 year old Blackbaud Kintera site to a Drupal CiviCRM solution. Confused yet? Don't worry, all we be revealed in time. As a way of giving back, I am planning to share my experiences good and bad, what worked, what did not, what I learned and what I will and won't do next time.
I’m based with a group of three churches in Bristol, UK and we transitioned to Civi in June 2011, integrating it with our new Drupal 7 website. We’re loving Civi’s functionality and the customization it allows, but there is one thing on my wishlist which may be on yours too – the ability to deal easily with recurring events, including reporting on attendance.
As most non-profits know, driving revenue exclusively off of events can be a hit or miss adventure. Revenues YOY are not consistent, and its difficult to find those supporters who will organize and host fundraising events to support your cause. Many are intimidated by hosting large fundraisers or simply don't have the time or resources to pull it off. So to sum up our problem: we needed a broader more consistent source of revenue to fund our programs. To expand our source of revenue, we looked to our community of donors, families, and fundraisers to raise money on our behalf through their own social networks. The average user on facebook has 30 friends [http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics] which means that we could exponentially increase our reach through online social networking interaction. All we needed was to setup the campaign pages platform and get people started.
San Francisco Baykeeper's case study of moving from Blackbaud Raiser's Edge to CiviCRM was the featured topic at this month's San Francisco meetup. I previously wrote about our transition in this blog and wanted to provide an up-to-date look at that process, plus our latest advances and ongoing challenges. Baykeeper has now been successfully using CiviCRM for almost a year.
There were around 15 people at the meetup, and we had a lively discussion with lots of Q and A during the presentation.
Texting - sending short messages via sms to cell phones is a powerful but untapped tool for community organizing. Recent Pew Internet studies have shown that young people of color use texting far more than other demographic groups, and increasingly access the internet and communicate solely through their mobile devices. Given this, texting has tremendous potential to help community organizing groups in the US communicate with their members.
As a freelancer, here are a few notes and an overview on how I solved a client's contacts consolidation when the data came from external sources:
My Use Case - Client had ongoing events and conferences over several years which meant there were databases and mailing lists all over the place (many of which had crossover). - I set up ongoing JSON exports of the contact data from the external sites, which could be queried by date range to get the latest changes.
