CiviCRM 2012

civicrm logoCiviCRM, the free and Open Source Solution for the Civic Sector went from strength to strength in 2011. 2020Media has been providing CiviCRM hosting for several years for organisations small and large. Hosting plans with integrated “zero-click” installs of CiviCRM start at £100 per year. Read more about CiviCRM Hosting.

Planned CiviCRM improvements for 2012

  • Accounting integration improvements and Quickbooks integration
  • CiviMobile – CiviCRM for mobile devices
  • CiviSMS – SMS blasts and interactions
  • Mass Dedupe and Merge – Batch merging for groups of duplicate contacts
  • Multiple membership renewal reminders
  • Relative date filters for all search forms
  • UK Direct Debit Integration

These planned improvements rely on donations to the core development team, so if you can donate anything at all to help ‘make it happen’, you can do so at http://civicrm.org/mih. You can choose the specific feature you want to target so it’s very clear how your donation gets results.

Let’s a take a detailed look at these 2012 CiviCRM features

Accounting integration improvements and Quickbooks integration

This feature is the first step towards enabling better integration of accounting concepts and systems with CiviCRM. It  implements a number of data changes to make further enhancements possible, as well as providing Quickbooks integration via IIF file export (and integration with other packages via CSV export)

CiviMobile

CiviCRM for mobile devices. This includes iPhone, Android, iPad, Blackberry and more. This version will include the ability to view/search contacts and see most of the details of each contact. It will also have the ability to create/edit contacts, and handle event attendee check-in.

CiviSMS

Support for SMS blasts and interactions, targeting the following features:

  • Broadcast an SMS message with token support to a group of contacts via workflows similar to Send Email and CiviMail
  • Collect responses from the above message and associate it with the message and the sender
  • Validate and store the response as a survey answer
  • Integrate with multiple SMS gateways – ClickaTell, Twilio and Tropo

Multiple membership renewal reminders

Administrators will be able to configure an unlimited number of reminders at specified dates relative to the membership expiration, and configure different message templates as needed for each reminder.

UK Direct Debit Integration

Requirements and specification are being developed here:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Direct+Debit+integration+%28UK%29+requirements+and+specification

Will allow UK based non profits to connect to a UK based direct debit provider and process recurring direct debit payments.