October 15th 2008 is Blog Action Day. I have posted a blog entry for Blog Action day here http://philipoakley.org/?p=140

The use of the latest web technologies by American Politicians is now reasonably common place with sites such as Facebook and the the use of Twitter in the Presidential campaign http://election.twitter.com/ but probably not so well known was that back in 2004 Howard Dean pioneered political donations on the internet using open source software. The Howard Dean Presidential Nomination campaign used the popular and open source content management system (CMS) Drupal to manage donations over the internet.

Drupal is well known to be very functional and customisable and the development started by the Dean campaign went onto form CivicSpace a customised version of Drupal which included many specialised Drupal modules that can help nonprofits, campaigns, plan and manage events. As is the open source way many of the modules were contributed back to Drupal. CiviCRM took a lot of these modules and has been improving it at a rapid pace ever since.

CiviCRM is constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, open source, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups. CiviCRM gives you the tools to connect, communicate and activate your supporters and constituents.

CiviCRM is now an add on module for both Joomla and Drupal (both popular Content Management Systems) in addition to this from the latest version 2 there is also a stand alone version. CiviCRM is modular and covers many of the areas that important to many non profits whether they are Charities or Associations. The core system covers many of the areas you would expect from CRM systems but with functionality and descriptions which are tailored for organisations that engage in advocacy, community and political organizing, and non-profit work. Information can be stored about individuals, organisations and households and the interactions with them, Currently the modules available are:

CiviContribute – Online Fundraising and Donor Management.

CiviEvent - Online event registration and participant tracking.

CiviMember – Online signup and membership management.

CivilMail – personolised email blasts and newsletters.

There are also other components that are coming out in new releases:

CiviPledge – Component to handle offline and self service pledges.

CiviGrant – Simple control of money given to constituents for expenses etc.

CiviContribute

CiviContribute allows you to create unlimited web pages for collecting online contributions for different campaigns, projects etc. Financial information can be imported and exported from accounting software. CiviContribute can also produce widgets that can be embedded on any web page allowing any site or blog to collect money for a campaign. See the example below.

CiviEvent

CiviEvent allows you to create as many pages as required for online paid for and free events with registration confirmations and receipts automatically generated. Information and be imported and exported to other systems and also users can export events as ical files and subscribe to public events with online applications (e.g. google calendar) via ical feeds.

CiviMember

Civimember provides membership management allowing the creation of customised web pages for self service membership signup and renewal. CiviMember integrates to CiviContribute for payments and CiviMail for group mailings.

CiviMail

CiviMail is a fully functional mass mailing component allowing you to target recipients by group with personalised messages with the ability to track click throughs, manage bounces and control unsubscribe requests.

Sites using CiviCRM

Completed by volunteers/in house staff with no paid consultancy

Drupal Association- http://association.drupal.org/donate

Open Source Matters Foundation (Joomla Association) – http://www.joomla.org/about-joomla/the-project/make-a-donation.html

Manhattan Country School http://www.manhattancountryschool.org/

Community Partners http://www.compartners.org/

Completed with paid consultants

Amnesty International http://www.amnesty.org/en/donate

Wikimedia foundation http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

Democrats Abroad http://www.conservationfund.org/

Conservation Fund http://www.conservationfund.org/

Bioneers http://www.bioneers.org/

More case studies and lots more detail of implementation are available on CiviCRM’s case study page here.

Additional Links
CiviCRM comes out on top in NTEN Survey.

Install requirements for Latest Version CiviCRM 2.1

Drupal 6 or Joomla 1.5 if not installing Standalone

Apache 2.0

PHP 5.2.x

MySQL 5.x with INNODB enabled

Although Linux is often recommended all the components are cross platform and should work for Windows and Mac servers