Author Topic: What are the advantages of CiviCRM compared to a traditional database? (Read 7867 times)

FatherShawn · April 25, 2007, 05:51:41 am

Quote from: geilhufe on April 23, 2007, 08:31:33 am

First, understand that CiviCRM is a constituent relationship management system... it stores data about people.

What then are the advantages of CiviCRM compared to a traditional database? We have a data store about our parishioners deployed in FileMaker. I have our website 80% developed in Joomla on xen based virtual server.

Michał Mach · April 25, 2007, 07:13:22 am

FatherShawn,

Since you asked a really important question, I took the liberty of establishing new topic just for this discussion and moving it to general discussion board. I'm sure a lot of people will benefit from reading this discussion. Everyone who sees pros and cons of CiviCRM over traditional database, please don't be shy and share your thoughts!

Just to start, allow me to list very basic, quick advantages that I see:

1. CiviCRM runs within/is integrated with content management systems, which makes data exchange between your website and contacts database nice and easy, giving you possibilities which are not available with traditional database.

2. Vanilla CiviCRM comes with components which would need to be separately implemented within traditional database: mailings, online contributions, member tracking, events registration.

3. More on components mentioned above - the information handled by these components is integrated within one database, which makes data analysis easy and efficient.

4. CiviCRM has a great community of users and developers and excellent support on the forum.

That's just quick intro, I'm sure others can see a lot of other aspects here.

Thx,
michau

geilhufe · April 25, 2007, 08:22:14 am

I'll give the historical perspective on this issue.

Most of the nonprofit sector uses excel spreadsheet to store data about people (names, addresses. emails). Excel is a very generic solution, so every group nonprofits stores information in a different way. Excel also is limited in that it is not a relational database... it is hard to track donations over time in a spreadsheet for example.

The next step up is a database... Access or Filemaker in most cases. The nonprofit starts with a blank slate and configures their database to reflect exactly how they work... contact information, donations, etc. The problem here is something like tracking parishioners is a generic task... why have 100,000 churches each build a Filemaker database to do basically the same thing?

This is where CiviCRM comes in... it "codifies business process" around common civic tasks. Basically this means it is designed to help you do common tasks in a common way while site providing configuration options to accommodate the differences between organizations.

So what common tasks does CiviCRM do well?

Track donations
Accept online donations
Track relationships between contacts
Search for contacts
Manage memberships
Send mass email newsletters
Share data with your website
etc.

I would think of CiviCRM as the FileMaker database you could have built if you invested one person full time for a year into it.

FatherShawn · April 26, 2007, 10:06:51 am

Quote from: Michał Mach on April 25, 2007, 07:13:22 am

CiviCRM runs within/is integrated with content management systems

The integration with Joomla, from reading the documentation and looking at your demo, doesn't feel strong. Now, bear in mind, I haven't installed and played with it yet since version upgrade in Joomla looks less that straightforward and you are close to making 1.7 final.

Quote from: geilhufe on April 25, 2007, 08:22:14 am

I would think of CiviCRM as the FileMaker database you could have built if you invested one person full time for a year into it.

That sounds very attractive!

Donald Lobo · April 26, 2007, 11:49:20 am

FatherShawn:

You might want to install and play with it before commenting based on the demo

(The demo is limited to joomla frontend only)

If there are specific areas of joomla integration that you'd like to see, please create a topic under feature requests and we can discuss it there

as an open source projects, code contributions would be welcome and desired. Scratching your own itch helps the product move forwards

regards

lobo

FatherShawn · April 27, 2007, 06:13:27 am

Quote from: Donald Lobo on April 26, 2007, 11:49:20 am

You might want to install and play with it before commenting based on the demo (The demo is limited to joomla frontend only)

No question... that's why I qualified my feedback.

I've just been waiting since the process outlined at Upgrading CiviCRM on Joomla! seems like too much overhead to work through for every beta build when 1.7 is close to stable.

I was very pleased to read the info at Synchronize Users-to-Contacts which I note is recently updated. I was sure that I read a page, which I can't seem to find now, that described a "thinner" connection between users and contacts in Joomla compared to Drupal.

As soon as 1.7 moves from beta to stable, I'll install it and give more informed feedback.

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Author Topic: What are the advantages of CiviCRM compared to a traditional database? (Read 7867 times)

FatherShawn

What are the advantages of CiviCRM compared to a traditional database?

Michał Mach

Re: What are the advantages of CiviCRM compared to a traditional database?

geilhufe

Re: What are the advantages of CiviCRM compared to a traditional database?

FatherShawn

Re: What are the advantages of CiviCRM compared to a traditional database?

Donald Lobo

Re: What are the advantages of CiviCRM compared to a traditional database?

FatherShawn

Re: What are the advantages of CiviCRM compared to a traditional database?