CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello all!!

First I will like to thank you all for readind this, and any feedback will be really appreciated.

We are creating a Foundation and we are thinking which is the best CRM to cover our needs, so therefore we have plenty of questions 

First, let me try to summarize the purpose of the Foundation which be a online tool to collect founds and distribute them among several partners / NGO's. We will be collecting founds online and through piggy banks mainly.

We have read the basic documentation for CiviCRM and some extension documentation and we have the following questions:

1) If we want to handle the mails to communicate with doners, to receive donations online, and to collaborate with other NGO's, and if possible handle the inventory of tshirts and piggy banks, which are the modules or extensions that we need to use?

Is there anyway to estimate the initial instalation and customizing effort? And are developments often needed?

2) We are going to develop our webpage with Wordpress and we will love to have the following integrations

   - 2.1 To collect doner information, and also clients buying merchandasing in Civi
   - 2.2. Display in the Web the actual status of collecting founds per project (e.g. Project A 1.000 € collected, 500 € remaining)

3) We are going to develop our online shop using Woocommerce, is there any integration already available?

4) Is there any integration available with Mailchimp? Or is the mailing functionality available as good as Mailchimp?

5) Is there any functionality or extension available for Inverntory Management (just for piggy banks and tshirts)?

6) Is there any functionality or extension available for Accounting and Auditing?

7) Have anyone used the CiviGrant extension? I have read that it is specific for Foundations collecting founds for other NGOs, but I haven't found (or haven't been able) any information about its functionality, etc.

I know that there are a lot of questions, but I hope that you can help us solving our doubt in order to move forward

MANY THANKS!
Alberto

Thanks for your response peterdnz!!

I didn't know about the integration with Woocommerce using Drupal, I will try to search for more detail but most likely we will develop de web with Wordpress as we have more skills developing.

Regarding the mailing functionality thanks for the explanation, most likely we will use Mailchimp then

If anyone else has more insights about the rest of my initial questions it will be really appreciated

Best regards,
Alberto

1) If we want to handle the mails to communicate with doners

CiviMail

to receive donations online

CiviContribute

and to collaborate with other NGO's,

This one is a bit vague - can you expand on what you mean?

and if possible handle the inventory of tshirts and piggy banks

I don't think CiviCRM is amazing on inventory management since it doesn't have the concept of stock.

Is there anyway to estimate the initial instalation and customizing effort?

Probably best to speak to a couple of partners, but have a fairly good idea of what you want to do first (more detailed than this post)

And are developments often needed?

If I were doing this, I would want to do put aside an annual budget for IT developments, because organisations change and grow and improve and you want to have a budget for your CRM to change and grow and improve alongside your organisation. IMO it is a mistake to this of this as an initial outlay with no more money spent in the future - you should think of it as a service, that you use each year.  It might be that some years you spend less than others, and over time, the annual spend may go down (maybe the second year you will spend significantly less than year 1, but maybe not).  But the above advice is not CiviCRM specific, it more about the way you approach your IT spend in general.

2) We are going to develop our webpage with Wordpress and we will love to have the following integrations

   - 2.1 To collect doner information, and also clients buying merchandasing in Civi
   - 2.2. Display in the Web the actual status of collecting founds per project (e.g. Project A 1.000 € collected, 500 € remaining)

This is out of the box stuff for CiviContribute

3) We are going to develop our online shop using Woocommerce, is there any integration already available?

Not sure

4) Is there any integration available with Mailchimp? Or is the mailing functionality available as good as Mailchimp?

Yes to both.  Mailchimp has a nicer user interface, but CiviMail on its own is better integrated.

5) Is there any functionality or extension available for Inverntory Management (just for piggy banks and tshirts)?

Not as far as I know.

6) Is there any functionality or extension available for Accounting and Auditing?

There is quickbooks integration.

7) Have anyone used the CiviGrant extension? I have read that it is specific for Foundations collecting founds for other NGOs, but I haven't found (or haven't been able) any information about its functionality, etc.

CiviGrant is useful primarily for organisations that distribute money - see http://book.civicrm.org/user/current/grants/what-is-civigrant/

If the focus is to follow the financial transfer, civigrant works, if the focus is more on the process of selecting and evaluating proposals and follow up, it might be better to use civicase and customise.

X+

Regarding the accounting and inventory management. There is a seperate Open Source tool for this called Odoo (http://www.odoo.com). We have been developing an extension for synchronisation between Odoo and CiviCRM. This synchronisation synchonises all the contacts to Odoo and contriobutions to Odoo invoices. We have also managed to synchronise the other way around menaing that new invoices created in Odoo are saved as Contributions in Civi. And that payment reminders are send from Odoo and strored as an activity in CiviCRM.

The Odoo software has an inventory management module.

Hey,

The Odoo synchronisation is open source but not yet published on the extension directory. This will probably happen in the comming months. You can find the extension on https://github.com/CiviCooP/org.civicoop.odoosync

There is also an Odoo addon to sync invoices back to CiviCRM. But I am not sure wether that one is open source (I think it is). I will ask the developer to reply to this post.

Thanks to both Jaap and Roel for your quick replies. I'll look into the github repos that you pointed me to.