CiviCRM for NGO

Question

Life Project 4 Youth (LP4Y) is a federation of local international NGOs, and we are looking for a single CRM platform that could help us to manage collaboratively and efficiently different aspect of our work.

Several questions:

1. Does CiviCRM propose support membership and donation management, Members/contact database, emission of tax receipt (accordingly to each countries regulations), compatibility support, emailing and event management?

2. Is CiviCRM adaptable to the needs and specificities of NGOs of different countries (Europe, Asia and USA)?

3. How does the installation of the platform works, do you provide technical support? How can the configuration of new items/tools work? Are we capable of doing it on our own or do we have to contact CiviCRM team because of the complexity of the work?

Thanks a lot for your response,

Inès

Answer 1

You may first like to read the CiviCRM User Guide here at https://docs.civicrm.org/user/en/latest/ which may answer many of your questions.

As regards technical support, CiviCRM is open-source and offers community contributed documentation.

Whether you are capable to install and administer CiviCRM on your own will depend on your own skill levels but you may be able to get help on this forum if you clearly set out any problems and requirements.

Answer 2

I think that basically CiviCRM could be a good platform for what you describe. CiviCRM is community developed and community supported. There are knowledgeable CiviCRM partners all over the globe who will be able to assist you on each location.

IMO it would be a good idea to work out how you would like to structure your support, what you would want to be able to do yourselves and what knowledge you would like to build up in your own organization and what you would like partners to do for you.

On the CiviCRM side I would recommend installing a version on one of your servers and do some prototyping of the kind of processes you want to be supported by your CRM.

Answer 3

And to add to Peter and Erik about the tax receipt: cividonate sends an email that contains the detail about the donation, that might or might not be good enough to act as a tax receipt based on the local regulation.

If you need something more specific, we do have extensions to generate the needed tax receipts for some countries (eg. in Canada or in France).

However, each country seems to have different requirements on what needs to be put on that tax receipt, so you would need to evaluate it on a country by country basis. It might as well be that based on the country of the donor and the one where your organisation is registered, you can't provide the document needed for the donor to be able to deduce the donation from their tax return.

Answer 4

The other thing to be aware of is that civicrm can provide multi-tiered permissions, so each country or region can use the same system but be limited to seeing only the contacts they should have access to.