Introduction
Lately, we have been evaluating open source CRM softwares that are available in the market. Remarkably speaking, the CRM software market seems to really on the move with SugarCRM and CiviCRM being some of the most popular and widely used open source softwares.
Our Requirements in a nutshell
We are a small non profit service organization and have the need of maintaining contacts ( volunteers, donors, media contacts, partner organizations, NGOs etc), accounting/donor/fund raising information and potentially a document knowledge base and project management/event planning functionality. In addition, we needed mass personalized mailing functionality as well and an ability to define internal hierarchy or relationship between volunteers or organizations.
Till now, we were maintaining all our information in Yahoo! groups Files section or not even that in some cases. Contacts were kept in different forms, most of the times misplaced and rarely followed up on properly. Out of sight is out of mind and thats what happened.
CiviCRM
Well, I was looking at online articles and blogs about similar non-profit organizations who may implemented open source CRM softwares, and that's when I came to know about Civicrm. I spent about a day installing it on Drupal 5.x (civicrm 2.0 does not work with Drupal 6.x yet) and exploring it.
The scope of this article is limited to CiviCRM and observations around it. But as all things, there is good news and there is bad news. Let me start with the good news.
Good features:
1) The GUI is quite simple and intuitive for administrators. Most of the features and projected functionality can be figured out easily.
2) Contact management and defining different kinds of relationships is simple. You can define relationships between individuals, groups and organizations, which is quite extensible. For a contact, you can define associated grants, notes, meetings, groups, memberships, relationships, mails etc, kind of like a central view.
3) Contribute and Grants module are good for Integration with online payment system like Googlc checking or Paypal and for tracking and pre-scheduling donations
4) CiviMail can do personalized mailings. Attachments dont seem to be possible (at least I could not see it work). Messages can be tracked etc, but the reporting interface does not compare with SugarCRM (more evolved). For actually triggering the mail delivery a cron job has to be run and for bounce processing, some extra unix utilies (e.g. AMaViS,postfix) have to be configured
5) Customization to current forms or tables is easy. When we upgrade to a newer version of CiviCRM, the Custom Data Fields and Custom Data Groups will be maintained. Specialized customizations using the PHP programming language will need to be re-created when you upgrade, however.
6) The data model is simpler and easy to understand. The entity relationship diagram is available at
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/CiviCRM+ERD+2.0
7) It has a planner features too -- activities, meetings etc (types can be defined).
8) Good user integration/sync with Drupal and Joomla
9) Although there is no menu link for CiviReports, the reports are available through http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/CiviReport. There are a lot of sql queries also that are available online on wiki.civicrm.org
Some other features -- but not essential for us:
1) CiviEvent is useful for putting signup pages for events. I thought it was kind of interesting though. Its good for promoting events and signing up people into your contact database.
2) CiviMember module can be used for tracking memberships to the organization (e.g. lifemember, goldmember etc). We did not need this functionality as we do not charge anything for membership, but it could be used at some point of time.
3) Can Configure Google or Yahoo Maps to work with CiviCRM. This is actually kind of cool. I always wanted to implement something like for our website wherein a project's location in the world could be shown through yahoo or google map.
4) The CitizenSpeak module allows the creation of email petition campaign nodes. Users enter the email recipients and the a message to create a campaign. When someone visits the node, they see a form that displays a preview of the message and allows them to enter their contact information and a personal statement. When they submit the form, the target of the campaign is notified. The version currently in CVS is built against Drupal 4.6. (http://drupal.org/project/citizenspeak)
Features lacking:
1) project Management -- This feature is present in sugarcrm Community Edition and we though we could use it for managing events (their tasks) and sharing event templates between chapters
2) Document management -- This feature would have been done to implement a knowledge base system for our volunteers and organization in general.
3) Can't create a new module through GUI, but APIs are published.
4) Leads and Opportunity Management are not present and not differentiated
Some Interesting Facts:
Amnesty International uses CiviCRM to collect website registration data and process online donations
Overall thoughts
I felt that the civicrm product is in initial stages and will see a lot of change or value addition in the near future. There are a lot of things coming and they will come slowly. From the http://civicrm.org/architecture, I could see that there was already talk of more performance or caching features in 2.1 version.
All in all, It still has some ways to go before it can catch up with sugarCRM. But then, civicrm is focused exclusively on non-profit organizations and is designed for them. It will have its own growth path: one that would may be less spectacular than sugarcrm for a little while, but it sure packs a lot of potential in it.
