CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

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

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