CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello,

I just presented CiviCRM to some colleagues and they were very interested. I've used it on and off for about a year now with volunteer projects, so I'd like to get us using it here at work.

One major reservation we have relates to support. The professional services page lists lots of companies who do bespoke work and, in some cases, a little support. But they (a) are mostly in the US and (b) don't seem set-up to do a dedicated support service. If one of my colleagues really needs to get some data out by a deadline and can't figure it out, are there companies who she could call in UK working hours to help her? The community is great, but it's dangerous for us to rely entirely on that with key relationship data.

A related thought is about training - does anyone know of organisations or individuals who could provide it in our offices in London? Not a huge issue, it just might be something we want to do in the future.

Lobo,

Thanks for that. When you say "a 24x6 online presence" do you mean you would only provide online support, or phone support as well? If it was reliable then that would make CiviCRM a whole lot more attractive to my colleagues!

On the topic of training, if any other users in Europe are interested it would be good to get a group together who could put in enough money to fund something like that. We'd never be able to cover the costs ourselves, but might be interested in sending some staff if the cost was low enough.

Thanks,
Tom

Hi this is John Kenyon. I would be happy to work with you and others to get a training together in the UK.

I attended Lasa's Circuit Rider conferences in London and in Birmingham this past January, where there was strong interest in CiviCRM. Perhaps Lasa and other organizations like Superhighways could help gather organizations interested in the training to pool resources. If you'd be willing to spearhead the effort, I'm happy to ask my contacts there to help spread the word and to post on the uk riders list, etc.

The training would likely be two days. The first day would cover basics of content management systems, including a more specific review of Drupal's basic concepts, terms and functions, followed by the basics of CiviCRM and its core functions. If there was a computer lab or a place with high speed access we could use, we could then go into the live demo and actually walk through doing some basic tasks in the actual program. The second day would review the functions in more depth, including the Mail, Contribute, Member and Event components. I have conducted similar trainings in various venues in the UK and the states with great success.

The cost of the training is normally $2500 (GPB1200)/day plus travel expenses. We could make it work if there were 15 organizations willing to spend around $500/GBP244 for the training (less if there were more participating organizations and/or funding support available). I'd be happy to work with you and the group on the costs depending on the amount of interest and any available funding resources.

I'm happy to discuss further with you off list if you'd like.

Best,

John