CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Several people in the this forum are helping me try to get CiviCRM running and I'm seeking out others that might be able to help and it remains to be seen whether I get CiviCRM running or not.  But I can't help wondering if I'm going after the right application.

There must be lots of activist and non-profit groups where CiviCRM is too much for them to handle, but email mailing list software may not provide the information that they need for contacts.  I'm also looking at www.phplist.com , but the application is really designed for email lists and not for managing contacts.

Looked a little at www.SugarCRM.com but it was too much for tracking contact interaction.

What is a small activist / non-profit organization to do?

Comments?  Suggestions?

Hi geilhufe - thank you for helping me get CiviCRM installed.  It remains to be seen, if I can figure out what to do with it.

You present an option of hosted CiviCRM services that should be considered by me an others.  I've looked at the hosting table and a discussion on how others are using hosted services and how well things are working out would be a good idea.  I'll start one elsewhere.

As for the if not CiviCRM then what? - I still think we have an interesting void.  What are our other options? 

One I'm looking at is www.PHPList.com   It has good emailing strengths and on the surface may be better than CiviMail, but I'm not at that point yet.  However, PHPList is weak on the contact management side.

We are coming at this from the email management side and while realizing that contact management is important, I might have some explaining to do that email may be a weakness (I need to look at CiviMail first).

Our current xml database used for email blasts is 354 KB of data.  With Drupal and CiviCRM installed, I think we have over 30 MB of applications installed and I've yet to look at the CiviMail email functionality.  I wanted to know what the "big guys" are using - guess I'm finding out, but feels a little strange.

Are there some suggested criteria when to choose CiviCRM, hosted CiviCRM or other approaches?

What other software do activist organizations use?