Two years ago I was in a committed, long-term relationship with CiviCRM. I was, admittedly, enamored with it. Sadly, over my first year at EchoDitto, CiviCRM and I grew apart. We talked less, barely hung out, and eventually became distant memories for each other. This was because most of my projects here have so far been focused on large scale Drupal development projects and online strategy that left CiviCRM falling by the wayside.

With the new year (and Valentines Day!), CiviCRM has re-entered my life like a long lost love. More and more of our clients are asking for it and coming to us for help with implementation. And it makes sense, especially in this tough economic climate - CiviCRM offers a powerful, open-source, and free (of ongoing licensing fees) constituent relationship management system that is tailored to nonprofit organizations and offers a wide array of features.

I may still have strong feelings for it but like with any relationship, because I know it so well, I can be the first to point out its foibles as well as its strong suits. This post is about presenting where CiviCRM stands out as the belle of the ball and places where it needs work.

What makes CiviCRM marriage material?

• Tight and advanced integration with two popular website content management systems: Drupal and Joomla! The integration with Drupal is so powerful that, for all intents and purposes, an organization can use one system to handle all of their external communication and their internal administrative and contact management needs in one place. It’s the proverbial one-stop shop.
• CiviCRM was built for nonprofits from the ground up. The terminology is understandable, comforting, and common to all nonprofits. As a result, the learning curve is tiny and someone can be using the system adeptly after just a few hours of training.
• Powerful and robust out-of-the-box feature set, including event, member, donor, and contact management. An integrated email delivery system with tracking of click-throughs and open-rates. Support for peer-to-peer fundraising, case management, and online forms.
• It is very extensible. Without technical skills, a staff person can add custom fields to track additional data, can add new “types” of contacts to organize them better, and customize administrative workflows for efficient day-to-day use.
• A vibrant community of developers and core contributors is constantly improving the tool and listening to users for new features.

Areas of improvement

• CiviCRM’s email delivery system is a challenge to set up. CiviCRM does not live in the “cloud” – you need to host the system yourself (or through your vendor/consultant) which means your host needs to be responsible for staying white-listed and not marked as spam when you use the bulk email feature.
• Reporting. For organizations with a large number of records, CiviCRM’s reporting tools may fall short. While there are a number of commonly needed reports built-in, there is no ability to create a report based on any data point on-the-fly . This is a limitation, but if an organization has access to a developer it is certainly something that can be worked around.
•  Lack of integrated advocacy toolkits. This is quickly changing. Organizations like the Progressive Technology Project are actively implementing support for common organizing tools like creating phone bank and canvassing lists, tracking voter info, and engagement scores. Read more here and here.

As with any tool, it really comes down to the strategy behind it and making sure you think through your organization’s needs before you decide to start a relationship, let alone make a long-term commitment.