When is CiviCRM the best CRM?

So far, we have discussed CRMs generically, comparing how they are used in the business world with the non-profit sector. There are many options available for implementing a CRM, which prompts the question—when is CiviCRM the best CRM for your situation?

Perhaps more than any other factor, what sets CiviCRM apart from other CRM solutions is that it was built from the ground up with non-profits in mind. While other products exist that are geared toward the non-profit audience, many are either a modified version of a product originally built for commercial sales, or target a very focused slice of the non-profit world, such as soliciting donations or managing members. Very few other options provide as complete and robust a solution, tailored to the common workflows and terminology of non-profits.

For organizations managing contact records, but needing to track both monetary and non-financial interactions, CiviCRM provides a powerful set of tools. These uses may include the following:

• Donations and pledges
• Event management
• Membership management
• Case management
• Bulk e-mailing

If your organization requires functionality in a couple of these areas, then it is very likely that you would benefit from CiviCRM. CiviCRM's integration with Joomla!, Drupal, and WordPress (popular open source content management systems that are excellent for running your website) also distinguishes it from a number of competing CRMs. By integrating directly with your website, information collected from your constituents will immediately be part of your contact database. Furthermore, you can expose real-time data to site visitors, or logged-in users, through searchable directories and self-service profile forms.

That said, we want to acknowledge upfront that CiviCRM isn't the right tool for every non-profit to manage its constituent relationships. There is no perfect one size fits all solution. Depending on your needs and resources, you may find CiviCRM unable to meet the unique demands and workflows of your organization. This section provides some general guidelines for situations where you might want to consider an alternative to CiviCRM.

As a low-end cut-off, your organization needs to have resources to set up, host, and maintain CiviCRM, either by paying a hosting provider and consultants, or by using internal staff resources. Tiny community groups with no budget or IT resources will not be able to afford these costs even though CiviCRM itself is free open source software without any upfront or ongoing license fees. While the public-facing pages are easy to use, administering CiviCRM does require a certain amount of tech-savviness. You may be constructing searches, setting up templates that will be merged with contact data for e-mail blasts, deciding on the fields to put in forms, and performing other similar activities. More advanced skills are necessary for some initial setup tasks such as configuring e-commerce connections to payment processors and designing how to store information among fields representing contacts and their contributions, participation in events, memberships, relations with other contacts, and so on. Not all organizations have these skills available internally, or can afford to outsource for them.

Thinking through alternatives

If your organization is small and your needs are focused on a particular task, it might be better to use a single-purpose tool, whether free, purchased, or available through paid subscriptions. Best-of-breed single-purpose tools can provide superior usability, desirable flexibility, lower cost, lower administrative burden, and higher-end features for that particular functionality.

For example, Google, Yahoo!, and other providers of free group e-mail list and discussion software is one example. EventBrite is one example, in the event management area, where the narrow task of managing event registrations may be accomplished more easily. There are a multitude of applications that can help you with bulk mailing, organizing and managing events, and memberships.

You will find that many single-purpose tools have started to expand functionality into other areas, but are primarily focused on one area. If your needs align in one of those focused areas, the limitations may not be problematic and the solution more appropriate.

Where each of these single-purpose tools may be very strong in one area and weak (or completely absent) in other areas, CiviCRM is generally very solid, if not exceptional, in all. It's CiviCRM's superior capabilities across the many diverse functionality areas needed by non-profit, advocacy, and membership-based organizations that sets it above competitors with even moderate CRM functionality.

Too often, many organizations find that they start using one of these targeted services to meet one need, and then adopt a second for a requirement in a different area, and soon end up with multiple data silos— systems that won't talk to each other, or require complex data-syncing protocols. Migrating to CiviCRM at that point is common, but the additional hassle of the migration and change in tools and procedures can be avoided by choosing CiviCRM from the start.

Customizing CiviCRM to match your needs

A different type of problem confronts organizations that have significant and well-defined needs that are not met by CiviCRM out of the box, even if it is functionally pretty rich. In these cases, the decision is often between building an in-house application from scratch, or customizing an application such as CiviCRM to do the job. CiviCRM as the basis for a custom solution makes sense in a number of situations. (See the Chapter 11, Interacting with Constituents – Managing Cases for more information and background.) These include the following:

• When you have the in-house skills and resources to work with the various technologies used to build CiviCRM, or have the budget to hire those who can do that
• When you are willing to invest initially in more general and customizable software, in return for getting the services of other users who will report bugs, improve documentation, submit patches, and enhance the functionality you have contributed
• When you can work with the core team and community effectively, which usually involves more time and a willingness to take other viewpoints and interests into account, but which often includes the benefit of others sharing the costs of development

Before continuing, let's pause to note one of the most significant aspects of CiviCRM that sets it apart from many of its competitors. Unlike most commercial CRM solutions, the CiviCRM software itself is free and open source. By open source, we mean the code (written primarily in PHP) is freely available and may be modified and customized to whatever extent you need.

When we discuss using CiviCRM as the base of a custom solution, we are suggesting that CiviCRM's out-of-the-box functionality may meet a certain threshold of your needs, and through custom development, you can tailor it to fully meet your needs.

There are still scenarios when using CiviCRM as a base for your custom solution doesn't make sense. If you find the base-level functionality only minimally meets your organization's needs, it is likely worth looking for a more complete solution to start from.

The advantages of building functionality into a full-fledged CRM also sometimes need to be balanced against the cost of extending CiviCRM. Significant changes or additions may require a significant investment of time and resources.

CiviCRM is built using PHP, Smarty templates, jQuery and pure JavaScript, and connects to a MySQL database. The variety of libraries and technologies, and the sheer size of the code base, have presented barriers for some developers hoping to modify or extend the core software that the CiviCRM team distributes and maintains. Even for experienced developers, there is a learning curve to understanding how the code is constructed and how various libraries are implemented. That requires a certain investment of time for your in-house developers as they acquire a knowledge base of the software. Of course, the CiviCRM community doesn't leave developers to wander in the dark without assistance. There are online resources for developers, an IRC chat channel, a CiviCRM Stack Exchange forum, additional support forums, and periodic developer training events.

Depending on the nature of your custom requirements, and the extent to which they are of potential value to the broader CiviCRM community, you may find it easier to extend CiviCRM through native CiviCRM extensions, Drupal modules, Joomla! plugins, or WordPress plugins. We will discuss the tools available through third-party extensions throughout this book, and touch on some of the underlying developer tools that make many aspects of customization quite easy in the last chapter. For now, understand that many customizations may be accomplished using extensions without the need to radically alter or expand the core software.

CiviCRM is an open source project that is quite responsive to community needs and contributions to address areas it does not currently cover. Indeed, the project generally extends its functionality by working closely with organizations that can sponsor new functionality or contribute new features back. Instead of hacking the core just for your own implementation, you can improve the core code so that it handles your own needs and those of others with similar needs.

If you search the CiviCRM wiki ( forums (http://forum.civicrm.org), and communicate with the core team and the community via the forums, or the CiviCRM Stack Exchange site, you may find that there are others who are interested in the same functionality, and may be able to contribute something to having it built. Even if your needs are unique, there may be ways to generalize them so that they can be met with software that addresses the needs of others at the same time.

One successful way organizations began collaborating to build new functionality into CiviCRM is through Make It Happen (MIH) initiatives. Started in August 2010, MIH initiatives have helped aggregate support from many users and consultants for several new pieces of functionality. The program works when one organization defines specifications for a project and works with the core team to refine the specs and determine the budget required. The organization must seed the sponsorship and can then invite other organizations to donate to the project. Once fully funded, the core team will begin work and incorporate the functionality into the core software for all to benefit from. The MIH program has proven a successful way to crowd-source specific improvements to the software.

Alternatively, your forum post or question on CiviCRM Stack Exchange may result in suggestions for simple or ingenious workarounds that can suffice in addressing an oddity in your requirements that was holding your organization back from going with CiviCRM. In this way, you learn from other organization's users how to use the software in more creative ways without requiring code customizations.

While the burden of maintaining your own code in sync with changes in the core is significant, well-resourced organizations sometimes find that it makes more sense to develop custom versions of open source software containing features that are not shared back with the community. Usually, this is because the needs are quite unique, such as integrating with a custom in-house legacy application.

Other CRMs

When deciding on a CRM tool, there are many existing CRM offerings that could be considered. The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN; provide a good indication of CRM market penetration and user satisfaction, with common solutions in this very large and influential region.

CiviCRM, Salesforce, and Convio are the three most used systems in the most recent surveys. Other providers or tools widely used, or acceptably rated, in these surveys include Antharia, Blackbaud, SugarCRM, Kintera Sphere, DemocracyInAction, and Organizer's Database. Although the cost and functionality is significantly different, Microsoft Dynamics CRM is another notable CRM in the larger non-profit sector, while Salsa sometimes crosses over from its focus on small and medium-sized businesses.

Needs will vary from one organization that uses a CRM to another. For example, Salesforce has tended to do better with large organizations (those with greater than $3M budget), as has Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge. As you evaluate a CRM tool for your organization, you should take into account the current and expected needs of your organization, as well as the current and anticipated functionality in possible CRMs. In other words, to the extent you are able, try to get a sense of where the CRM development is headed, and who is the core audience they are seeking to cater to. Given this caveat, the next section will outline common reasons for adopting CiviCRM over the other alternatives.