civiCRM

We've been using CiviCRM for over 5 years. Out of the box its ugly and practically unusable, so it must be customized (cost for a developer who knows how to code). Because we needed it to integrate with a few proprietary systems of ours, we are fortunate to have some developer help. I would not recommend Civi for any organization wanting instant usability, or small or poor non-profits.

UPDATE to above 2015 posting: we're still chugging along with CiviCRM, and still stand by our review. It's very powerful for customization, but you need a resource - employee or contractor, latter of which there are many - who knows what they're doing. Open Source software is free, like puppies!  All in, however, we believe we have spent less for CiviCRM than what we would have spent with one of the mid/larger AMS providers. CiviCRM is becoming more and more useful, as the worldwide Open Source community has done a considerable amount of updates, e.g., new modules and capabilities that are configurable, e.g., quasi-out-of-the-box ready.

CiviCRM has a strong track record of serving associations since 2005, with over 10,000 installations today around the world in a variety of languages.

It has a flexible system for memberships and event registration, and integrates with numerous payment processors. It integrates with popular accounting packages like QuickBooks, Sage and Great Plains. For associations lthat need them, there is support for managing grants, volunteers, cases and campaigns. Custom fields are intuitive and powerful. Bulk email and bulk texting is supported, as well as social media integration. There are hundreds of extensions providing enhanced functionality and integration with external services. For charities, it has extensive fundraising options.

For many associations, the excellent integration with their website will be crucial. WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, are amongst the CMSes supported, together accounting for over 2/3 of websites using CMSes.

JMA Consulting provides CiviCRM Consulting services to many kinds of associations, including regulated professionals, business associations, disease support organizations, and other associations with advocacy and fundraising needs.

 

Open source is a good thing, and a bad thing.  You are not at the mercy of one company and their product being bought by a competitor.  There is a community working on improving it.  And - you can choose a vendor that you like to help you make the most of it, if you don't have the expertise in house.  And if that doesn't work out, you can get a new vendor.  That's the good. 

The bad is - something breaks in an update, you don't have anyone to blame.  You can have a patch built by your vendor, can share the cost with others in the same boat or wait for someone else to do it, depending on how important it is to you.  

We have a great vendor helping us with CiviCrm.  The reporting is extremely okay, and most reports are pretty easy to run and understand.  If you have a straightforward membership model, and run fairly simple events, or use it for donations, it works just fine.  

But I do feel that it is not as nimble as it could be for a hybrid org, like we are, and some things just don't work well for us.  I think it would perform better if you just have individual members. 

I established CiviCRM for our organization almost 8 years ago, and I'm very happy we made the change to it. It's come a long way in those 8 years, but the best thing I can say about it is that it enables staff to do our jobs. We can easily retrieve records, make changes, run reports, and all of the other back-office activities that are required for association professionals. It also does all of the things we need an AMS to do, including:
Membership management
Contact management
Email/newsletter management
Event management

There are definitely things that I wish it did better, but in general we're able to easily find work-arounds for most limitations. The very best part is that there are no licenses, it integrates pretty seamlessly with our CMS, and updates are not too difficult. You will need a developer either on staff or on retainer/contract to help manage initial implementation and upgrades, however day-to-day work is easily managed by staff with fairly basic training.

CiviCRM has a large community of users and developers that make this software possible. Depending on your situation that can be a plus or a minus. 

It's been said before, but this software is not right for everyone. But it can be an affordable, flexible and robust solution- depending on your association's situation. Here are a few checkpoints: 

Do you use Drupal CMS? If so, you're halfway home. Civi was built for Drupal and works best in that environment, though it now supports operating with Wordpress and Joomla. The integration of CiviCRM with a Drupal website makes membership forms and login functions much easier. 

Do you have a Techie on staff? Not required (see below) but nice. Let your techie set up a sandbox and load some of your records. It will cost you nothing to actually see it work with your data. 

Do you have international members? CiviCRM (and Drupal) can manage different languages pretty easily. Even multiple currencies can be used.

Is your budget tight? Civi costs nothing. That said, it won't do much unless you have a dedicated techie to configure it. The best approach is a hosted solution that specializes in Civi and understands it. Let them configure it and you can have a powerful system that costs thousands less each year than Microsoft-based systems. 

If you said yes to any of those then you should at least take a look at Civi. It's definitely a different approach than most of the AMS on this site. But for some associations it's a great option.

We have been using CiviCRM for the past 6 years. We've worked with a couple different consultants (hiring someone is necessary when working with this open source software) and spent thousands upon thousands of dollars having it customized for our needs, and it's still not a user-friendly experience for our end users. On top of that, we've encountered multiple bugs (some cost thousands of dollars for us to hire our consultants to build patches for, since this is open source and there's no official support). It's not all bad, and I think it might work better for certain organizations than others (we're a trade association, fwiw). All in all, I wish we could go back in time and try another option...

We have been using CiviCRM as the basis for our association's CRM and online member services for six years. We use a complete open source solution, combining CiviCRM with Drupal for the CMS. Overall, CiviCRM is a fantastic product ÐÊit comes with no licensing cost, is very powerful, is entirely customisable, and is geared towards non-profits. However, as with many self-hosted open source products, it requires a considerable amount of development and maintenance to fit your needs. Smaller associations might find that the system is an almost perfect fit, and larger organizations will likely have the resources to customise it as needed. Small to mid-size associations with more complex needs that do not necessarily have the budgets for full customisations, might however struggle with CiviCRM as a solution, as even smaller customisation can quickly become problematic.

We use CiviCRM with Drupal. As an open source software, we are supportive of the community aspect of Civi however we have reached our breaking point with it. We have not had an internal developer on staff or even an affordable consultant for over one year and without that person available to address coding issues/conflicts, we find we spend more time working around the glitches to make it work. Great idea but if the organization doesn't consistently invest in a staff person to maintain/fix it and ongoing training and development for other staff, it becomes too much.

I have now been involved in two reviews of our CRM system and we selected CIVICRM both times. The reason being is that for us CIVICRM provides the most VALUE. It does not have as many of the features that can be found in high end CRM packages, but for us it does everything we need. It links to the CMS Drupal, which means that it offers membership & events self service as well as the ability to personalise the front end website. On the back end it allows us to manage our membership signup/renewals, event registrations and also our mass mailing. As it is open source it also benefits from being constantly updated by an active community of developers, so I am confident that it will only get better from this point. One of the major down sides to it being open source however is that both CIVICRM and Drupal require "Major Updates" every few years, which may require an investment to update. That said though, the initial investment is quite low. For about £15,000 we had a new website redesign, CMS implementation and CRM implementation. This is about half of nearly every other quote that we received. We were previously on ACT, but the self-service element of the new website has meant that our team of 5 has had a significant reduction in administration and this has meant so much more time in developing our service offering and marketing efforts (which has had a huge increase on the bottom line) . I would strongly recommend this AMS, but I should also balance this review with some negatives. * The reporting side of CIVICRM is not great * The more customisations that are implemented, the more that it breaks * The mailing feature is perfect on a budget, but isn't as strong as 3rd party software (mailchimp, dot mailer and the like) * It doesn't have any modules for exams / CPD (not a requirement for us) I hope this review helps people, for a basic membership package I truly believe CIVICRM is the best solution for the price of implementation. It won't be for everyone, but I would recommend that every association evaluates CIVICRM for it's own needs.

We use civiCRM coupled with drupal for our website. We are an association with organizational members and individual members. I find civiCRM to be buggy and complex and this makes difficult for us to manage our membership data and relationships.

The main issue with the AMS is pulling the necessary data we need for various member related activities. The same member data cannot be pulled across all search functions and is limited based on which search you use. Member based searches cannot pull contribution data and contribution info cannot be pulled for member searches. This has proved frustrating for our purposes. As an open source software there is more self training and research involved to fully understand the system or at least that as how it worked in our case. When you are part of a small staff with limited IT support it can be difficult maximize the system.

CiviCRM is open source and thus the implementation, provision of service and customization depends upon the expertise of the developer selected to implement the project. We went with a "Local" web development company that indicated expertise in CiviCRM -- in the end their expertise was limited, which resulted in delays and many, many problems. We have since changed developers to implement an upgrade and add several new modules selecting a company closely involved in the ongoing development of CiviCRM. We are quite happy with the work of the second company; they were able to resolve many of the problems we had been experiencing for a reasonable cost. . It is thus important to carefully select a developer. The CiviCRM community has recently made it easier to identify and evaluate the experience of developers and companies on its list and their commitment to CiviCRM. Overall we are now happy with CiviCRM as an AMS Ð it offers many possibilities, it is however not free to install and you need someone with experience to install and maintain it over the long run.