CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I've been meaning to do this for a while.

Wellington Circus Trust is a small charitable trust set up 'foster a thriving circus community in Wellington, New Zealand'. We started up at the end of 2005 and have grown pretty quickly. A pretty key part of what we do is running classes in circus skills and keeping people informed about circus happenings.

For the first two and half years I maintained all our contacts (about 500) and enrolments (approx 500 per year) in an Access database. This was fairly labour intensive so in Feb 08 I settled on & implemented CiviCRM. CiviCRM enabled us to have more than one person with direct access to our contacts data, to have people do on-line enrolments and allow people to maintain their own details and unsubscribe. I have estimated that it saved about 100 hours in the first year - even though we are a small organisation.

The only custom information we currently hold is emergency contact details and although I did develop a payment processor and a custom search (for aggregating $ received from events) these have both been incorporated into the core for 2.1 so we have a very standard install.

The problems I had installing civiCRM were in four areas. First and foremost I initially tried to set it up using our existing ISP which was not sufficiently flexible. I wasted a lot of time on that! I ended up setting up civiCRM and civiMAIL on a separate website on a different ISP http://www.freeparking.co.nz (our site is http://classes.org.nz). It costs $NZ 280 per year and is money well spent. I have ambitions to develop the classes site independently of the circus trust and run enrolments for other organisations through it too.

The second significant problem area was Paypal. At the time paypal was the only possibly credit card processor and in 2.0 you couldn't do pay later without one. However, I have found paypal to be a real nightmare and about 10% of our customers seem to have problems using it. I'm in the process of moving away from Paypal - NZers reading this - try WIPS plus through Westpac - it uses DPS paymentexpress and Westpac offers it cheaper than other banks do.

The third area of problems was because I decided to use the version in Beta at the time. Obviously all the problems I experienced as a result of this have been fixed but I wanted to mention it because working with the Beta, although frustrating, also allowed me to get a lot of tweaks / improvements made very quickly. While I would note that the civiCRM core development team are always pretty responsive to help with problems they are even more so if you are helping with their beta testing at the time!

Lastly, I opted for Drupal as it seemed to be better integrated and supported but I found it much more difficult that I have found joomla (on another project) to navigate, to get up and running, to improve the appearance of (not that I have tried hard) and to get support on (I found the Drupal site itself to be really hard to use). However, on the plus side it does have better acl support.

As far as using civiCRM itself - our users are pretty low-level users and I have created a series of shortcuts across the top rather than have them navigate around civi. There is a drupal module that allows items to be shown based on the users role but unfortunately that didn't seem to get along with civiCRM so I don't have the granularity I would like. The navigation for users is still an area that I need to put more thought into.

Overall, however, I would say that we are tremendously grateful to civiCRM for a product that beats anything else I could find for our contact management and enrolments and for the amazing amount of support they provide through their forums and directly. As I said earlier it is a significant time saver for us.