Is CiviCRM right for our non-profit?

[stillstonevisions]

My organization, Western Colorado Congress (WCC) has about 2000 memberships and many thousand historical payment and other contact records.  I have been in charge of the database for WCC for 7 years, using Ebase 1.03.  I also used the same program for 3 years before that at another non-profit.  During that time, I have become a pretty sophisticated user, writing custom scripts, defining special purpose fields, often with complicated calculations underlying, and creating all sorts of custom reports.

We feel it has come time to upgrade to more up-to-date, user-friendly, and probably web-based technology.

3-4 years ago, I worked part-time for a year as a consultant for another non-profit.  They were using CiviCRM.  It performed abysmally.  My biggest complaint was that it was terribly, unacceptably slow.  There were other problems too, but the details have gone vague for me after 3 years.  I do remember that, compared to my experience with Ebase, CiviCRM at that time seemed surprisingly unsophisticated and short on features and functionality.  I participated some on the CiviCRM forum at the time, and the responses to some of my questions was that I needed to learn to program in Drupal to make it do what I needed.  It was clear that I was dealing with programmers who were impatient with anyone who wasn't as sophisticated as they were.  The program was, in my opinion, so inadequate to my tasks that I switched that organization back to Ebase 1.03 just in order to get them functioning with their membership database, and they are still using Ebase today, though I no longer work with them.

So now I'm helping WCC switch to a newer database.  We are leaning towards CiviCRM at this point, though we haven't yet installed it on our own servers or imported our data, and given my experience of the past and the bad taste that left in my mouth, I'm nervous about this direction.

I would love to hear responses from experienced users pertaining to my evaluation questions, including:

Has CiviCRM substantially improved in the last 3 years in functionality, speed, support, and features?
Does CiviCRM run acceptably fast for you?  If so, how big is your membership database?
Have you needed to customize it at all for needs that were not addressed in the basic code?  If so, how did you do that and how difficult was it?
Any other comments regarding whether you love or hate CiviCRM and how it is working for your organization?

Thank you so much for helping me and my group.

Paul Chubbuck
Western Colorado Congress

[geilhufe]

Compared to where Civi was three years ago, you'll not see the issues you raise. However, it is possible, for an average charity to experience all the issues you raise today. This tends to be when the charity doesn't have a capacity to work with complex software and/or doesn't have the resources to hire qualified help.

#1 Civi speed is much improved, however speed tends to be an issue of proper configuration and maintenance of the underlying LAMP stack (linux, apache, mysql, php). Even a few years back, people we getting acceptable to good performance on large data sets through proper tuning of their stack.

#2 I'd be surprised if you found feature deficits.

#3 Support is probably pretty similar. I find Civi support on the forums to be great and am surprised you experienced "impatient programmers." The people haven't changed, so you may perceive the forums as not having changed much. On the other hand, the community is a lot broader so there are a lot of new voices on the forums that you might perceive to be more helpful to you.

#4 Customization is impossible to characterize in general, IMHO. In Ebase you were using Filemaker scripting. In Civi you are using PHP. For someone starting from scratch I suspect each environment is equally difficult. You'll probably want to look at how to build custom reports in detail during your assessment.

#5 complex calculated fields. IMHO, Civi really doesn't support this very well. You would need to break out of the Ebase mind set and move those calculations into the reporting layer.

[beyondnines]

The benefits of CiviCRM brought you this far.  You may as well try it out!  Do a test install, import some data and give it a spin.   You will most certainly have questions but your questions will better answered here once you've got a test site up and running.

Best of luck!

Cheers,
Glen

[Erik Hommel]

I would also recommend having a prototype with CiviCRM. I have no experience of 3 years ago but I (and my customers) find it functionally rich and easy to use software. Speed can be an issue, you'll need to spend time in configuration of the lot, fast is certainly possible in my experience, but it requires work.