In the past year the team at HiDef has worked on quite a few projects that involved Drupal and CiviCRM. Our experience with the tools (the good, the bad, and the ugly) has prompted us to do a four-post series here about how they work and how they’ll improve moving forward. We think the series will be beneficial for nonprofits, for developers, and for ourselves.
Both Drupal and CiviCRM are open source projects. Both feature growing adoption among developers and end users. Both meet many of the needs that great causes have. The value proposition for this duo is great. At the same time, many organizations aren’t harnessing technology, still using paper and spreadsheets to manage donors and events, missing golden opportunities to add wisdom to data and share the responsibility of nurturing constituent relationships with all staff using web-based solutions. So how can Drupal and CiviCRM work together to decrease the barriers, encourage adoption, and, in short, help improve the world?
Nonprofits have many needs that software solutions such as Drupal and CiviCRM try to meet:
- Donor relationships
- Volunteer relationships
- Lifetime and recurring memberships
- Bulk email campaigns
- Activists
- Clients (ie the people the organization serves)
- Events (of all sorts of types)
- eCommerce
- Website(s)
Drupal+CiviCRM handle a lot of these needs, but what we’ve found is that the “it just works” factor isn’t quite there yet. In fact, what we’re seeing more and more is that even with all the nonprofit-centric software out there, no solutions “just work”. In the end, organizations find themselves having to hire a specialist to customize a solution or end up buying many different pieces of software that do some things well but not others, causing duplication of data and overlapping functionality.
Indeed, a recent NTEN Survey, as well as another community survey by NPower, share some important conclusions that confirm our own recent experiences regarding nonprofit software solutions:
- most nonprofits aren’t happy with their ‘ecosystems’, ie. the combination of software solutions that, combined, make up the IT used to run their nonprofit
- Drupal is the #1 CMS in use by nonprofits
- CiviCRM is the only offering to see noticeable adoption across multiple needs (ie. people use it to manage not only donations, but also donor relationships, memberships, and events). No other tool saw this type of adoption. For the most part niches have been established: Constant Contact for bulk email campaigns, Raiser’s Edge for donor management, etc.)
- most nonprofits don’t spend a large portion of their budgets on IT, nor do they want to
- many nonprofits use custom solutions to meet many of their needs (which can be lack longevity and get expensive)
- most nonprofits who haven’t “gone online” with their toolset see the value in it
Nonprofit software solutions are improving, but they’re not quite there yet. The promise of Drupal and CiviCRM is great, greater perhaps than many other solutions given the unprecedented of their development communities. The question remains: “How can we make it better?”
My team and I are now on a mission to delve deeper into the Drupal+CiviCRM value proposition as a way to positively contribute to its future, and in turn, help nonprofits achieve their missions more effectively. Over the next four weeks my team and I are going to take a look at three topics:
- Drupal+CiviCRM: The Participant’s Perspective will focus on what it’s like to interact with Drupal+CiviCRM as a donor/member/volunteer.
- Drupal+CiviCRM: The Developer’s Perspective will focus on what it’s like to install, configure, customize, and extend a Drupal+CiviCRM installation.
- Drupal+CiviCRM: The Nonprofit’s Perspective will focus on what it’s like to administer and upkeep Drupal+CiviCRM as a nonprofit
