CiviCRM vs. Salesforce for Nonprofits: Data Management and Reporting Questions

[JuliaKM]

I'm trying to help my nonprofit organization(http://www.aashe.org) decide whether to go with CiviCRM or Salesforce and have a few questions. I last used CiviCRM about a year ago. I plan to write up my analysis of CiviCRM vs. Salesforce at the end of the decision-making process and I would be happy to share it.

There are two areas where I am unclear whether CiviCRM can meet our needs: data management and reporting. We have some funding available for hiring someone to help us make CiviCRM customizations but I don't want to create a solution that is so customized that upgrading is impossible later on.

Data Management
Our members are universities, nonprofit organizations, and companies. It looks like CiviMember is set up to track individual membership and not group membership.
We have the following data-management requirements:
- Ability to have many-to-many persons to organizations relationships
- Ability to have one-to-many relationships between persons/organizations and address/contact info
- Ability to relate organizations to other organizations (parent-child)
- Ability to relate organizations to other organizations in many-to-one relationships
- Ability to require that persons belong to at least one organization
- Ability to track changes in a person’s relationships to organizations over time
- Ability to relate persons and organizations to events

From an initial glance, it looks like we would need to create an additional component to meet this need. UPDATE: It also looks like CiviMember Phase 2 would meet a number of these needs (http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviMember+-+Phase+2+Specifications), which is part of CiviCRM 2.3. Is there a timeline for CiviCRM 2.3? I didn't see one on the roadmap.


Reporting
Ability to use an external report-writing package that allows easy creation of custom reports (something like Crystal Reports)
Ability to integrate membership and payment information with Quickbooks
Ability to create graphical reports within the reporting engine (pie charts, bar charts, etc…)
An API for report generation

I was at the recent Drupalcon in DC and reporting was a common concern for those using CiviCRM. I know that we could try to utilize BIRT or Drupal's Views in reporting but both of these solutions have their drawbacks.

[Donald Lobo]

hey julia:

most of your data management needs are met by the current version of CiviCRM. A few that are still open include:

- Ability to have one-to-many relationships between persons/organizations and address/contact info (not sure what this means)
- Ability to relate persons and organizations to events (not sure what it means for an organization to be related to an event)

depending on your requirements: Ability to require that persons belong to at least one organization this can be done via a hook or cron job etc

CiviMember Phase 2 is not scheduled to be part of 2.3 (is this written somewhere). If aashe.org would like to sponsor / put a developer resource on implementing some of the items there that would be super cool

A few companies in the past have used Crystal Reports to hook into the CiviCRM DB for their reporting needs. If you do down this route, it does address most of your reporting needs.

QB integration is not available but would be a great addition to core

lobo

[geilhufe]

Lobo beat me to it, but here are some other details,

I think the biggest difference between Salesforce and Civi is that Civi does things like member management "out of the box" whereas in the Salesforce ecology you will purchase an add on or an implementation from a consultant.

Organizational members are supported, you just need to create an appropriate "relationship type".
The various relationship requirements are supported.
Requiring orgs to have members would require customization, I believe.
Historical relationships is supported.
If you use CiviEvent, those relationships are automatic.

You can try all this out on the demo site: demo.civicrm.org

Most external report writers including Crystal can connect to a MySQL database that underlies CiviCRM.e Q
The Quickbooks integration would be via CSV or custom built API... there is some discussion in the community... search the forums.
CiviCRM does not include a reporting engine. The graphics piece could be provided by the drupal modules View & charts (for a limited data set) other folks have use coding to accomplish the requirement.
Civi provides a full API.

[conductorchris]

The Salsa package (built on Sales-Force) from Democracy in Action does a lot "out of the box".  It runs on the software as service model.

[Donald Lobo]

salsa from DIA is not build on top of SalesForce (though it has some integration with SalesForce). Convio's common ground app is built on top of salesforce

lobo

[JuliaKM]

Thank you lobo, conductorchris, and geilhufe! I am amazed by the responsiveness and helpfulness the CiviCRM community. In addition you all of your insightful responses, Judy Hallman answered a bunch more of my questions at our local Drupal Meetup last night.

You've answered most of my questions. To summarize:

CiviCRM supports:
- The association model of relationships (members are organizations and not individuals) (Note: Judy and I are going to try to test this out in the next few months)
- Reporting, via Crystal Reports or another plug-in report writer. When I mentioned this to my colleagues though, they said that Crystal Reports licenses add up in cost very quickly. You could also write custom code or try to use Views.

CiviCRM doesn't support:
- Quickbooks integration, although there is a lot of community interest and AASHE could potentially sponsor this feature's development

@conductorchris and @lobo: We're going to check out Convio and another 3rd party app as well. From first glance, it looked like Common Ground could quickly become very expensive. As for DIA, I haven't heard a whole lot of good feedback when it comes to integrating with Drupal. If you're interested, I believe that there's a new Drupal group starting to try and work on DIA-Drupal connection issues.

@geilhufe: The link to Phase 2 is on the v2.3 candidate features page: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCRM+v2.3. Is there also an approved features page?

[Donald Lobo]

@geilhufe: The link to Phase 2 is on the v2.3 candidate features page: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCRM+v2.3. Is there also an approved features page?

Basically our next version list (in this case 2.3) is more of a dump of all the things we'd like to do in a future release. Once 2.2 gets out the door (today?) we take a look at the 2.3 list and create a 2.4 list and start moving things around

The CiviCRM advisory group along with the CiviCRM core team has decided that 2.3's main focus will be on usability. This will include UI changes and functionality tweaks / additions to make current features more robust, complete and easy to use

lobo

[Andy Laken]

As for DIA, I haven't heard a whole lot of good feedback when it comes to integrating with Drupal. If you're interested, I believe that there's a new Drupal group starting to try and work on DIA-Drupal connection issues.

Hi Julia,

I've been using Drupal for about 4 years, DIA for about 3, and some CiviCRM experience thrown in. Drupal/DIA integration is something I've been thinking about for a long time, and I've written some custom integration code for certain projects, but nothing that's fit for release to the public. Recently I've been talking with some Drupal folks about getting serious on writing some DIA integration modules – in fact just got off the phone with a developer who has some code he plans to share with me. I would really appreciate it if you'd point me to the Drupal group you mentioned; it would be great if all parties working on this could have a central meeting place.

I was at Drupalcon but missed the CiviCRM session – wonder if our paths crossed?

many thanks,

- Andy

[JuliaKM]

Hi Andy,

Here's the DIA Salsa group:
http://groups.drupal.org/salsa

It's too bad we didn't all have a chance to talk about DIA as well together at Drupalcon. I'm afraid that I don't know much about it.

Julia