CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Greetings!

I am trying to get some information from actual users of civiCRM to get some idea of how well this tool may benefit the organization I help. If you have a moment and experience with civiCRM could you answer the questions below?

Thank you
Tim Sherwood

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As a volunteer team member for a small Non-Profit Organization, I'd like to get some basic information
about civicRM if you've been using it for 6 months or more. We are looking to automate and manage our
membership with an online tool as well as manage regular events, and civiCRM is a possible choice for us.

Has civiCRM integrated well with your overall website administration and ISP?

From your own experience, can a non-technical person use the product to manage membership
and do event production & management? Have you used civiCRM for event management?

What was your primary purpose for using civiCRM?

What is your role?

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Hi Redshift

Dave from www.HealthCareForAllColorado.org here. 
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,1926.0.html

We currently use a custom CMS approach for our public website and have installed the CiviCRM / CiviMail on a separate hosting account for administrative users.  We used a separate hosting account to give us flexibility to change to a different host or go with a hosted CiviCRM or other Contact Management approach if necessary.

At this point, Drupal is just a staging area for CiviCRM, but if we ever actually learn something about Drupal, we might someday consider for our public website because of the granular security by person by function.

CiviCRM is the largest and most complicated application that I've every tried to run with the CiviMail portion certainly the most complicated.

The reason for using CiviCRM is:
(1) CiviCRM is open source and if necessary we may have a chance at minor modifications
(2) CiviCRM gives the most flexibility for contact attributes that we have found with an open source package.

Current issues:
(1) We have 14 people inputing names and working the lists.  While protect the bulk mailing by limiting the number of people able to use CiviMail for bulk mailings, any one of the people can choose the core (NON CiviMail function) more actions item "Send Email to Contacts" and immediately send out an email to all contacts in the database if they wish as long as they don't run out of memory doing the whole batch.  Our plan is to either limit the number of emails that can be sent at one time using "send email to contacts" or delete the option from the dropdown list completely, or change the interface to push the email to the user's own email client (this was a nice feature in our old system).

(2) CiviMail handling bounces - making some progress here, but certainly one of the more complicated areas to implement in a shared server environment.

(3) Our old system was very compact.  The data and all the programs for 2,000 people was maybe 500K.  With CiviCRM the application alone was 30 MB.  When we first started, the phpMyAdmin export was maybe 3 MB.  Now after growing to 2,600 contacts, lots of custom fields and mailings the last phpMyAdmin export was over 20 MB.  As this file size growth continues, we will have a probem.  However, the export dump of the contact information is only about 500 KB in csv format without activit or membership information.  So I think we are likely to be able to prune the activity files periodically once we learn how to do it responsibly.

Good luck - I'd love to share experiences and ideas.  As for recommendations - CiviCRM is where we are at with the above reasons and considerations.