CiviCRM for legal services organization?

[oshma]

Greetings, all.

I am the IT manager for a nonprofit legal services firm in New York City. I have installed CiviCRM on my own hosted web server, and I am intrigued by its capabilities.

We currently use an antiquated SQL Server-based case management system (Automon's Practice Manage) that is essentially no longer supported. We use hosted Raiser's Edge for our fundraising. We use Kintera for our fundraising event management. We use highly customized programming of Joomla 1.5 (!) on our website to manage training registrations. Data management, as you can imagine, is a nightmare.

Our primary goal is to replace our case management system. These are the top must-haves:

Be hosted;
Allow for in-house development of and changes to client intake scripts in which branch logic and field validation are easy to implement;
Allow document assembly (Microsoft Word) with integration of client data;
Allow the storage of all case-related documents within the system;
Allow for integration with Outlook 365 for email and calendaring;
Allow for event registration; surveys; email blasts; and tagging of entities with constituent codes;

And the development department's wish is that it integrate with Raiser's Edge. They are planning to upgrade to Joomla 3.x at some point, and I am also interested in knowing how extensive Joomla-based development is for CiviCRM's modules.

Having read through some of the forum discussions, in my wildest fantasy I would replace our Raiser's Edge use with CiviContribute, and use this as one, integrated system for everything.

All that said--is there anyone out there who is using this for a direct-service legal aid organization? If there is someone who has also moved from RE to CiviCRM, I would love to hear from them as well.

I would dearly appreciate any insights, comments, experiences, etc.

Thanks, all.

Mary O'Shaughnessy
Manager, Information Technology
Her Justice

[petednz]

Hi Mary  - and welcome to the world of civicrm. You have some big tasks here and I will only touch on some parts of it.

Converting RE to CiviCRM is a more likely outcome than integrating them. We are doing an RE migration currently for clients in Australia and I know others have been through that challenge. In our case we have used the Drupal Migration module to manage the data migration and theoretically at least that should mean that at the end of this we would have something that could be re-used depending of course on many factors including versions of RE etc. My understanding prior to this migration was that migrating from RE can be a mission because of some RE peculiarities and that has been borne out by this project.

"Allow for in-house development of and changes to client intake scripts in which branch logic and field validation are easy to implement". Sorry but I don't understand. If I am guessing wildly in the right direction, this could be in the form of webforms (thinking drupal here) which we use for other clients to create the Cases along with the various contacts that should be associated with the case.

A note that unless there are strong reasons for working with Joomla as the front end, Drupal will give you many more tools that can be very helpful with complex workflow process (thinking Views, Rules, Webforms)

"Document assembly" again not clear what that means but the term may be familiar with others, but if this is to do with attaching case 'files' to the Case (or Activities) then yes those options exist.

"Outlook" - can't say but some work has been done on this by others

"Allow for event registration; surveys; email blasts; and tagging of entities with constituent codes" should all be out-of-the-box

I am sure others will chime in here too.

[Upperholme]

Hi Mary

On the face of it my advice would be to go for the "wildest fantasy" option and dump all of your legacy systems in favour of a Drupal/CiviCRM implementation. But maybe in a phased way.

I believe it could:

Handle your case management requirement;
Save you a pile of cash and improve your data integration by replacing RE:
Deal with all your event management, enabling you to dump Kintera (which has been absorbed by Blackbaud and presumably phased out).

Drupal is way better integrated and supported (Drupal/CiviCRM has a much larger developer and user community than Joomla/CiviCRM).

It's hosted. It allows for storage of case-related documents. It allows for event registration, surveys, bulk email (and SMS). All in a single integrated database allowing you a 360 degree view of your constituents.

I'm not clear on the details of your other key requirements, perhaps others here can offer more on those. I do know I've had issues with Office 365 , in that it struggles to cope with the fact that email with the same domain name can come from somewhere other than it. Civi can provide iCal feeds that can be picked up by calendaring systems. Some entities can be tagged, although I'm not clear on what a constituent code might be. And the document assembly sounds to me like it might need some developer input. And I'm with Pete on the idea of using Drupal webforms for your client intake routing.

All  in all a reasonably close fit I'd say.

Hope this is useful.

Best wishes
Graham

[Erik Hommel]

I can only confirm what Pete and Graham have already stated. Go for the replacement rather than the integration, but probably phased. My guess is integration will cause you more headache than replacing.

Migration should be do-able but will almost certainly require investigation and work, and you probably made some choices in data setup in RE that will have to be revisited for CiviCRM.

I am unclear on the same points as Pete and Graham are. I know there is some work done with Outlook, but you might revisit the whole subject once you have a firm understanding of what CiviCRM can offer you in mails and bulk mails.On a functional level there is a difference between the organization wide event/activity/mail stuff in CiviCRM and a private Office 365 mail and calendar. Most of our clients tend to do all mails and events that everyone should know about in CiviCRM, rather than integrate with Outlook and still not know the total correspondence with the customer/client/donor because John is ill and we can not access his Outlook?

Welcome to the CiviCRM world!

[oshma]

Thanks, all, for the kind welcome and helpful insights!

I think the easiest toe-in-water introduction for a rather change-resistant staff would be to implement the parts of CiviCRM that would replace Kintera/Sphere/Friends-Asking-Friends, since we _know_ those have to be replaced. (Yes, a different data store, management issues, yep, yep...I know. sigh.)

I am still debugging a Wordpress installation I did, just for a coworker (one of the least-change-averse staff around) to play with. I'm having those permission-denied messages on the dashboard that I don't want her to see, so I need to clean those up before giving her access.

Additionally, I think this is an _outstanding_ solution for a friend in a tiny nonprofit who, right now, has data in FileMaker, Donor Perfect, and Mailchimp. I am thinking a basic install of Civi would work very well to clean up their data management and workflows.

So, still thinking and testing.

[Hershel]

I definitely agree a slow approach is best.

If you have any questions how to fix your permissions issues, feel free to start another thread--we're here to help.

[oshma]

Thank you, Hershel. I did indeed start another thread about the permissions, here: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,35666.0.html