CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi all,

I'm currently working for a medium sized non-for-profit of which spends excessive amounts on proprietary software and have been trying to convince the migration away from Raisers edge.

From my forum trawling, I've identified that the migration from rasiers edge to civicrm is pretty common.

Now, I basically get overly excited when I install CiviCRM and have been trying to push this system to my organisation for months, but as we are not 100% financially stable, there is a lot of hesitation to take risks.

As far as I'm aware, we only use raisers edge for emails, constituent management, memberships and donations.

After running a lot of tests of my own in my own time, I've set up Civicrm in wordpress, themed it as our current website, imported a couple of lists of our constituents and set up smtp mailing.

----- Actual question:

I'm attempting to create an estimate of hours and cost of migration and implementation.

I feel like I could implement this within a month or two as a pilot program with little cost or risk - apart from my time. Am I over simplifying how difficult it is to completely implement CiviCrm, because as far as I can tell it seems on par with setting up a customised CMS. Am I missing something here? It seems a bit too easy - considering what we pay for Raisers edge.

My expertise sits within web development, design and PHP.


Thanks guys, I know it's a bit of a long post.

Hi Mollusk
implementation times and effort vary HUGELY. From the sound of it, you've got a pretty good handle on what your org needs and the technical skill to set up Civi (which is still a bit beyond a WP install). So that puts you ahead of many folks out there.
In fact a lot of the work in setting up Civi is pretty straightforward, but you need to think carefully about how you structure your data (custom fields, groups, relationships, etc.) and that can affect the time you need for imports. Compared to what you're paying for RE though, it IS too easy and you probably have a better UI that gives you more power to configure stuff.
One word of caution is pay real attention to your mail config if sending out mass mailings. Set up spf records, reverse dns etc. so you don't get blacklisted.

Good luck

Dave

Agree with Davem that implementation costs can vary hugely between one project and another. Data migration can really hit you if your source data is inconsistent or fairly polluted. And that is something you usually do not find out until you migrate the stuff :-)
I understand your organisation is a bit wary of costs because the money is tight. This is obviously a situation where lots of ngo's find themselves. The combination with risk avoiding is killing, because risk avoiding usually leads to more money being spend! Yours is a good example: your organisation might not want to go the CiviCRM route because there is risk involved and stick with Raisors Edge to avoid risk....and thereby being hit by more costs! Strange contradiction that keeps amazing me :-)
I reckon your idea of what is required to get the system up and running in a technical sense could certainly be done. The rest depends on the adaptation by users, and that requires attention too. Something we tend to forget as developers :-) And you should certainly be able to set it up with little costs apart from your own time.

Although I do not experience the session issue that sonicthoughts mentions myself, I do agree in general terms that there is always a risk of some technical issue that will either require you to dig in deep or to contact one of the CiviCRM experts. And most times these issues only occur in your specific context (hosting party, server set up etc. combined with CMS plugins and CiviCRM).