Author Topic: Suitability of CiviCRM (Read 1832 times)

jennifer · December 26, 2007, 08:42:40 pm

My school is considering using CiviCRM as its new database management system for our alumni records and fundraising efforts. We need a lot of flexibility for being able to analyze financial data, pull up customized reports, send out communications.....everything any school Development Office would be able to do.

Any thoughts about how well CiviCRM would be suited to our needs? We are NOT "tech pro's" !!!

Donald Lobo · December 26, 2007, 10:35:09 pm

I think schools and CiviCRM are quite a good match

Since i'm going through the school admission process for my 2 kids, i am definitely interested in building / extending CiviCRM to meet any specific requirements schools might have. Elin Waring from MCS (http://www.manhattancountryschool.org/) has done a fair amount with regard to this and probably has a few good ideas (i'll ask her to comment and add her thoughts to this topic)

If a couple of folks who know schools can collaborate and come up with a spec / list of needs, we can start doing the needed work. Obviously any of these changes will be in the 2.x release. CiviCRM can be used to manage the application process, alumni and the development needs.

With regard to your specific questions, its hard to answer without some very specific questions. The schema is open and flexible, so you can use a tool like BIRT / Access to come up with reports for your specific needs. As an open source project, improvements are being made at quite a rapid pace

lobo

mcsmom · December 27, 2007, 12:04:53 am

Hi,

I think CiviiCRM can work really well for this. It's really flexible, and you can add the custom data you need easily. I can find groups of people, like all of the alumni in the arts, much more easily and what's nice for me is to be able to easily create new tags and groups.

In terms of reports, it's complicated. As Lobo says, if you can run a tomcat server you can run Birt, but that takes you to a different level of cost (though still small compared to a proprietary solution) and technical complexity. My own tendency has been to write some basic reports using some of the report writing extensions in Joomla!. On the other hand, I know there are ways to work with civireport without tomcat if you have someone who knows how to set up direct access to the database for you.

I like the idea of finding some schools that might want to work together on a list of specs.

yasheshb · December 27, 2007, 02:03:51 am

here's an alumni site running civicrm...

http://www.stanislites.org/alumni/
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/St.+Stanislaus+Ex-students+Association

you may want to compare features etc.

hth
yashesh

CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

News:

Author Topic: Suitability of CiviCRM (Read 1832 times)

jennifer

Suitability of CiviCRM

Donald Lobo

Re: Suitability of CiviCRM

mcsmom

Re: Suitability of CiviCRM

yasheshb

Re: Suitability of CiviCRM