Oliver Gibson and Michael McAndrew will be providing a 2 day training course in London in March covering the configuration, administration, and every-day use of CiviCRM.
The course is aimed at administrators and users from organisations that are either using CiviCRM or are interested in evaluating it. It is also of use to implementors and developers who need a complete understanding of CiviCRM’s “out of the box” features and configuration options.
As well as covering the specifics of CiviCRM, they will share examples of previous projects and can help with specific problems and use cases.
There’s now a regular monthly meetup for CiviCRM users in London. Someone from the 2020Media team usually attends so if you’re going and would like to talk, let us know!
Also in March, NfP Services are hosting a free seminar at their London offices (with refreshments and lunch included). See http://civicrm.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=193 for details. The event is ideal for anyone who is new to CiviCRM and would like to find out more
2020Media is a hosting provider for CiviCRM and we are supporting the new regular London meetups that are kicking off this month.
London CiviCRM meetup
The event will be held at: Manta Ray Media Ltd., Finsbury Business Centre, Unit 42, 40 Bowling Green Lane, London, EC1R 0NE (map). Which is between 10 and 15 minutes walking distance from Angel, Barican, Farringdon and King’s Cross stations. It’s free, and there will be drinks and nibbles and time to network.
We’ll start with a drop in session from 5:30 to 6:30 for people that are new to CiviCRM and have specific questions that they want answered. We’ll run this on a first come first serve basis – so please arrive early if you’d like some help. We’ll then have our CiviCRM meetup from 6.30 to 8.30 with presentations suitable for new and existing users, implementors and developers. There will definitley be something to interest all levels of experience.
What is CiviCRM?
CiviCRM is web-based, open source, internationalized software that allows you to record and manage information about your members, clients, volunteers, activists, donors, staff, and vendors.
Unlike most other CRM software, CiviCRM was designed from the ground up for non-profits, membership and advocacy organizations. Rather than trying to adapt to a commercial sales-force automation model, CiviCRM gives you familiar terms and concepts. CiviCRM is freely downloadable without licensing fees making it an affordable and cost effective solution compared to most proprietary vendor offerings.
See you there?
Representatives from 2020Media will be along at the meetup so if you would like to have a face to face chat, please let us know you’ll be attending and we’ll arrange to meet.
The UK CiviCRM user group meeting took place last night in London. We were there, and this is our report.
CiviCRM meetup
The meetup was hosted at techhub, in London’s “Silicon Roundabout”, Old Street. Our host for the evening was Michael McAndrew of Third Sector Design, a company specialising in CiviCRM based in techhub.
Meet-ups are free and a great way to get to learn more about CiviCRM and are suitable for those that are new to CiviCRM as well as people that have been using it for years. There were two presentations, a mingle session and a case study report from a charity that’s successfully implemented CiviCRM.
CiviCRM in 2012
The keywords for 2012 are: mobile, scalable, community.
CiviCRM
A code sprint (?) scheduled for later this month in London will be focusing on CiviMobile. CiviCRM for mobile devices 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 allow users to create/edit contacts, and handle event attendee check-in. Several core developers will be in town and any developers are welcome to join.
CiviCon is taking place in San Fransisco on 2nd April. CiviCon is THE annual event bringing together the people who use, develop, design and implement CiviCRM. Good news for us in the UK though, a CiviCon Europe is planned for Autumn, although dates and location have not yet been finalised.
CiviCRM 4.1 News
Beta release for WordPress – along with Drupal and Joomla, CiviCRM will now work within WordPress. WordPress has emerged from it’s blogging roots to become one of the most widely used content managment systems in use today, powering an amazing 14% of the web.
Social plugins (Facebook, Twitter etc).
Better cron (simple for admins to setup).
Personalisation of campaign pages for events (think JustGiving).
Improvement to admin menu.
A couple of UK specific projects were mentioned, with a call for some help from developers or sponsors to get them completed. These are Direct Debit integration and Gift Aid. The Direct Debit integration is a “make it happen” project, which basically is a call for funding, and the Gift Aid module needs a bit of development help to fix some not too tricky bugs.
CiviCRM Marketing
The new CiviCRM website
Dave Moreton, from Bristol based Circle Interactive, talked to the group about improving the marketing of CiviCRM. It’s apparent that next to the giant forces of SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics etc, CiviCRM has a much lower profile. It’s also true that it’s a very different product. That said, the non-profit, membership, civic sector are often unaware of the existence of CiviCRM and end up using a commercial-focused CRM system that is less than ideal. David’s talk was about efforts within the CiviCRM community to increase awareness, talk up it’s successes and provide comparisons and marketing material for system integrators to use. He finished by showing us a sneak peak at the new CiviCRM website, which of course aims to solve these issues.
If you are interested in helping, there are occasional IRC meets, an online group at civicrm.org/groups/marketing and PDFs, Powerpoint and how-to material at Spreadtheword
CiviCRM Case Study
Finally we heard from Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research (LLR). Parvez Saleh from Veda Consulting, talked us through the tasks that were needed for migrate in just 2 hours a complete legacy system to CiviCRM.
the LLR website
LLR went from a system that was used by just a few users which specialist knowledge (and lots and lots of spreadsheets), to a website-integrated CiviCRM system that can be accessed by 80+ users, speeds up the financial reporting functions and will save the charity tens of thousands over the next few years, as well as enabling increased fundraising. Now one of the largest CiviCRM installations in the UK, the system serves the needs of 350,000 contacts, 90,000+ participants and over 1.2 million contributions a year. LLR are now holding a “spreadsheet amnesty” to move all data onto the system.
Successful Event
The event was attended by around 50 people. Most were new to CiviCRM but we also met with system integrators, developers, current users and administrators. The user group meeting showed that there is an established infrastructure of support for CiviCRM here the UK, and organisations considering it for themselves can be confident they will get the support they need. 2020Media provides complete hosting packages for CiviCRM, and our support is based around our hosting expertise. Therefore we can deal with the kind of problems you might have if you get a error on a page, emails not being sent, uploading images and so on. We can also help users get to grips with the basics of using Civi. We also have a network of developers and consultants so get in touch if you want to know more.
CiviCRM, 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
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)
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.
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.
