Ask Idealware: CiviCRM and CiviMember

Dan asks: I serve on the Technology Advisory Counsel of a San Francisco-based Arts non-profit. We are currently researching software to support our organization's membership management needs as the bulk of our constituents are "members" as opposed to pure "donors". A couple questions: First, is CiviCRM and CiviMember ready for prime time? We are willing to invest time and money into the initial set-up of these systems, but are concerned about the stability of the initial feature set. Any comment on how much momentum is behind CiviCRM? Also want to get your opinion as to how "integrateable" CiviCRM & CivMember are with say white-label social networking software and/or custom applications (we are looking to build apps that involve fairly advanced data integration and UI such as uploading pictures of art work and other artist information during the registration process).

Michelle Murrain, Principal of MetaCentric Technology Advising, Steering Committee of the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative, and Zen of NPTech blog, says:
CiviCRM is right now pretty young - it's got a fairly strong base of features, but it's not yet near the feature set, maturity or stability of other major CRM platforms, unfortunately. It has the advantage of being open source, but the APIs aren't well developed yet. It works with either Drupal or Joomla, both of which can be integrated with other things -but that could take a lot of work, depending on what you were trying to integrate.

Anyway, there is some adoption momentum. It does have a broad user base, and there is a lot of development going on. Many organizations seem to be finding it up to their task.

One thing is that you'd need to make sure that the detailed requirements you have match up with the requirements that CiviCRM has, and what might need to be built. It's critical that no matter what decision you make, that you've generated a document that makes it possible to know for sure what features you absolutely need.

CiviMember is totally integrated with CiviCRM (it comes with the basic install, which is nice), but it's honestly, er, well, rudimentary, as a membership management tool. Basically, it allows you to have an unlimited number of different membership chapters and types, and assign people to those chapters and types. And people can sign themselves up (or you can sign them up). And, well, that's just about it. Members are individuals in CiviCRM, so all of that functionality goes with it - but a *real* membership management package it isn't. So it totally depends how important sophisticated membership management is to you.

All of that said, the acquisition cost of CiviCRM is nonexistant, it has the advantage of being open source, and therefore adoption of CiviCRM and any ways that you get involved in the community has broad benefit. There are quite a number of Drupal specialists out there right now who can implement it for you - I'd say that if the feature set matches your requirements, it might be worth a try.

I think CiviCRM will be around for a while, but it is still pretty nascent. Ready for prime time? That depends on what your needs are. Definitely go in with your eyes open. But then, that's true with any software choice.

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