Let’s introduce ourselves…

[LindseyM]

CiviCRM is all about community.  We use it because we want to develop communities… of members, supporters, donors and so on. I’m based at a church in the UK (www.woodlandschurch.net) and we’ve been using Civi since June 2011.  During that time I’ve been impressed not only with Civi itself, but with the Civi community itself as it’s friendly and responsive, both online and in person! 

Over the months I’ve become increasingly aware that sector-specific needs exist amongst Civi users.  We all have certain generic needs, but different sectors have common needs and challenges to address.  That’s why this forum board has been started. 

My hope is that, on this forum, those of us in faith-based settings can share our successes and failures, our wisdom and questions, our ideas for Civi developments and collaborative opportunities to turn those ideas into reality. It won’t be a technical support forum (as there are other boards for that) but I hope that we can point one another in the right direction if we’re facing a challenge.  It will also be a place where potential users can see how others in the faith-based sector are using Civi.

Why not get involved right now:

- write an introduction about yourself and your organisation in this thread so that we can see who else is using Civi in a faith-based setting and how you’ve gone about that
- tell others about this forum board so that they can introduce themselves
- start your own topic about particular issues which may be of interest to others. It may be a problem you’ve solved or a challenge you face that is common to others in our sector. For example, I’d love Civi to have the ability to easily manage recurring events and to record and report on attendance.  This would be relevant to our courses (like  Alpha and parenting), our weekly children’s groups and mid-week small groups. It is functionality that would be of huge benefit to our sector (and others) and I’ll start a topic on this soon!

CiviCRM is a wonderful resource. Let’s collaborate together as a sector, sharing good practice and working together to make Civi an even more effective resource in the future.

LindseyM (If you’d like to contact me directly, my email is lindsey.mansfield@woodlandschurch.net)

[dowd]

Hi,
I have a been using CiviCRM for a few years for church databases for a few churches. I first encountered it when trying to find a database solution for http://ebe.org.uk/, I had inherited an Access Database and then converted it to ChurchInfo database http://www.churchdb.org/ which was fine for basic info but wasn't really up to the job. Then after lots of trial and error I managed to get it on Civi (the main problem was hosting it on a shared server). I have now installed it for a few churches and Christian Charities (including working with LindseyM to implement it at Woodlands Church). I have recently installed for http://glenwoodchurch.org/.

It has been a steep learning curve trying to figure out how to store different bits of information in Civi as a Church. Groups seem to be key as so much of what a Church does is based around groups of people, Civi does seem to lack in somethings to do with groups though especially not being able to have group leaders etc easily. Also there seems to be some issues around households, and how they are displayed on labels etc.

Dowd

[davidshq]

I'm new here and am exploring CiviCRM as a possible/probable solution for the church I work with - Calvary Community Church in Penndel, PA. Previously we maintained our membership lists in word files and spreadsheets. I have tried using BVCMS, and considered writing my own ChMS. I tried Salesforce NPSP (their non-profit pack) and have also worked with other systems at other times such as GoldMine and Raiser's Edge. So far I like CiviCRM pretty well...but each time I've thought I found what I was looking for and have been disappointed...
In any case, I'm looking to get CiviCRM installed soon...though I'd like to do it on WordPress rather than Drupal/Joomla, since I am more familiar with WordPress and that is what the church website is built on.
Dave.

[LindseyM]

Hi dowd and dave, thanks for introducing yourselves.

dowd - you're right that there are some limitations in functionality when it comes to general church use, requiring 'work arounds', as Civi is aimed at many different sectors.  I've appreciated the way that, with developer input, we've been able to tweak things behind the scenes to customise it more specifically for our needs, as well as being able to liaise with others in the community to try to push more significant developments through.

Part of my hope for this forum is that it will encourage collaboration so that we can not just identify, but address any gaps Civi has when it comes to church/synagogue/mosque use etc

Dave - I'd encourage you to go ahead with installing and testing Civi (I presume you've played around on the demo site?). It's excellent that Wordpress integration is now a reality - http://civicrm.org/blogs/yashodha/announcing-41-alpha-1-release-support-drupal-6-and-7-joomla-17-and-wordpress-33  Have you looked at Civimember as it allows lots of reporting on membership over time.  We're planning to start using that soon for our main membership categories... although we need to find alternative ways of dealing with small group membership.  We have over 100 small groups and these are currently reflected as Civi groups which is good for emailing them and viewing static numbers, but doesn't allow you to report on trends over time or easily identify leader/member etc in scale.

Having gone to Civi from a Microsoft Works database (via a disappointing church software detour) we have appreciated the remote access for team members and the ability to hold ALL of our information in one place rather than in numerous departmental lists and databases.  It's a one stop shop for us! 

[ken]

Hi!

I'm Ken West from the City Bible Forum. We're an Australian not-for-profit that creates opportunities for city workers to read the Bible and understand it's message. Visit us at www.citybibleforum.org.

We've been using Civi since 2008 when we replaced our home-grown Access database. We've been generally happy with Civi and find that growth in our needs is usually tracking well with developments in the product, which suggests to me it is a good fit.

Some current growing pains include ...

• Our staff tend to be good with people and not-so-good with systems. A contact database implies certain disciplines that Christian staff workers find frustrating.
• It would be good to track ongoing activities without creating events. For instance, we would like to keep a roll of people attending a Bible Reading Group. However, creating an CiviEvent for each meeting is too heavyweight, and creating an Activity with multiple associated Contacts has no programmatic support (no form, and importing Activities creates many Activities, not one Activity with many Contacts)
• We run courses and events over a number of weeks. It would be good to model these as a CiviEvent with a recurring date, but this is not yet feasible. Instead, we use a Drupal node with a recurring Date field. (The node is used instead of the CiviEvent Info page.)
• We see ourselves as an organisation of Christians who are operating for people who aren't Christians. So we work hard to make our site accessible for people of all faith positions. In particular, we try to keep our site free of Christian jargon. That makes it difficult occasionally to speak to our supporters who are Christians. It may be that the CiviMember component is one we need to explore. Allowing people to sign up as members may open a channel to talk to them about issues like financial support. We don't heavily promote financial support on our site, as we feel people are sensitive about Christian organisations asking people for money.

Ken

[LindseyM]

Hi Ken. 
It's good to hear from you.  I like your website - very easy to navigate.  I'm with you on points 2 and 3 about the current inability of Civi to deal with recurring events such as courses or activities like your Bible Reading Group.  I think this is a key point for many organisations and particularly for churches which want to record attendance not just at courses but at weekly children's groups and so on. 

I have written about this at http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=48398441 with the aim of it becoming a  Civi Make It Happen (MIH) project.  In order to get the project onto the MIH pages I first need to secure seed funding.  My church is happy to seed fund, but we need two or three others to come on board as seed funders and I'm currently talking to a USA church about the possibility.  Do take a look and see if it's something you might consider seed funding too so that we can get it off the ground as a MIH and see this key functionality become a core part of Civi.  It will make Civi SO much more marketable for churches etc as setting up recurring events and recording/reporting on attendance is a very basic need for the sector. 

On your last point, you're right that being able to communicate with certain supporters in a particular way is important.  Civi is excellent at segmenting contacts, so whether you explore using Civimember (or just Groups) to segment people, that would be a good way forward.  Not only could you write/email these people specifically, you could also have specific parts of the website accessible just to them eg we have a whole Leadership Development section of resources on our website which only those in our Civi Group 'Leadership Development' can access. I'm not a developer, but I think we may have used Drupal Organic Groups to do this.

Do contact me by email if you're interested in finding out more about seed funding the recurring events functionality.  Thanks Ken.

[ken]

Lindsey,

I'll ask our CEO whether he is open to contributing to the seed funding. You say that the project has been costed - does that estimate cover Phases 1, 1a, and 2, or just a subset?

My comment on the success criteria for such a development is that a key measure is that it has to be easier/better than recording the names in a spreadsheet and then retrieving stats from the spreadsheet - otherwise people won't take it up.

Ken

[LindseyM]

Hi Ken

I'm currently chatting to lobo in order to firm up the recurring events project costing and functionality.  It's probably easiest to continue our conversation by email rather than on the forum, so do email me on lindsey.mansfield@woodlandschurch.net and I can tell you more specific info.

Lindsey

[scott.ward@fifthestateci]

Hi, I'm the volunteer database coordinator for Takoma Park Presbyterian Church. We've switched over from a proprietary database to CiviCRM. We've managed to configure all the fields correctly, bring over lots of historic data, and successfully set up the pledging and accounting functions.

The one thing I'm finding elusive is creating a printable church directory (if I could get the output I'm looking for online, I could take it from there). What I want to be able to do is...

1) List a household name with some specific basic information (address, home phone and photo, e.g.)
2) List ALL members of that household along with some specific information for each (e.g., e-mail, alternative address and cell phone).

I would LIKE to also be able to include some family members in the sublist, but not others. (e.g., Adult child does not want to be listed in the directory).

I've looked all through profiles and reports, but just can't seem to make this happen.

Any thoughts woud be MOST appreciated. Thank you.

Peace,

Scott Ward

[LindseyM]

Ken
I've just started a forum post within CiviEvent about the Recurring/multi-session event Make It Happen project at http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,23399.0.html 

Please make any comments there... as others are welcome to do as expanding Civi's functionality so that it can deal easily with recurring events (like weekly children's groups and multi-session training courses) is core to most faith-based organisations.

Thanks
Lindsey

[LindseyM]

Hi Scott
Thanks for getting in touch.  Please can you start a new topic within this forum on Civi Household Issues (or whatever you want to call it).  There are various challenges we all face and what you've described is one of them so it'd be helpful to have a separate, specific topic on this so that people can access and comment on it more easily. I'll reply to you there - no great solutions as yet I'm afraid, only further thoughts.

Lindsey

[SarahG (FountainTribe)]

My name is Sarah Gladstone.  I have been using CiviCRM with religious organizations for over 4 years, primarily with synagogues.

The main challenges I have run into are

a) Anything that deals with family relationships in the self-service areas.
This includes the issue Scott mentioned with member directories. It also includes parents registering children for events/programs( described at http://civicrm.org/blogs/sarahgladstone/lets-put-r-back-crm), and collecting information about a whole family on one profile form.

b) Simplified navigation/reporting for low-tech (or no tech) staff members who are usually focused on the family when interacting with the system.

c) Limitations of managing large numbers of repeating/ongoing events, like religious services.    Closely related to this is managing children's programs like religious school, after-school programs, and related needs like attendance.   This also includes managing shifts of volunteers. Such as a need for 10 people for each of 5 shifts, which occurs every month.

d) Accounting limitations, some of which are being addressed by the MIH project called "CiviAccounts"


I look forward to hearing about how other religious organizations are using CiviCRM.

[robinhood]

I volunteer for a small Christian theatre with five staff.  I am not an IT professional but am learning as I go.  Like all theatres, they never have any money so it was not hard to convince them to try open source.  :-)

They switched to civicrm from an access database several years ago.  At first the main use was to store contact data, print mailing labels and to send civimail.  We have gradually expanded the ways in which we use civicrm as we have gotten comfortable with it.  We are using civievent, civicontribute, and will soon start on civipledge. 

We are making extensive use of a stand alone program with a feature set specialized for theatre ticket sales called freeseat.  I would love it if that functionality could be turned into a drupal module with hooks to civicrm, but they don't have the resources (and I don't have the skills) to make that happen.  As it is, I do a lot of Export, Cleanup, Import, Dedupe, Repeat.  The same goes for quickbooks. 

As for priorities:
1.  Currently syncing with Quickbooks is painful.  Looking forward to CiviAccounts.
2.  A way to capture relationships in event registrations, as already discussed.  (Coleman's webform_civicrm module is awesome for non-event relationships.)
3.  Streamlined POS workflow would be a first step to using civi for ticket sales.
4.  We would also make use of recurring event functionality.  Classes, lessons and group events occur weekly, and each show has a series of performance dates over a period of a few weeks.

Thanks.

[dowd]

Scott Ward - I'm about to look at making a printable church directory from Civi as well in the near future for a church I work with. They are using an old database system at the moment to produce it as they want it done quickly but ideally would like to do it via Civi next time. I haven't really spent any time looking at it but the main problem I have is the one I seem to always come across is displaying households!
My initial thoughts (but not tested in any way!) are to do it via Drupal Views but I will still have to somehow get household members to display together. I will keep you updated on my progress.

[Donald Lobo]

For folks interested in a "household" like report, there is a sample here we did for a school:

http://svn.civicrm.org/sfschool/trunk/SFS/Report/Form/Roster.php

Its a bit limited in the household structure (since its only interested in the parents), but should be able to give folks some start on creating a more generic household report

lobo