Your Organization Profile for CiviCRM - Survey - To help us make an educated decision

Question

We are really hesitant on moving toward CiviCRM because of our size (40k donations per year and > $5M in income with 150k contacts). We have put together this survey below...what is the best way for me to connect with other similar sized organizations to help me get answers to these questions? We are coming from BlackBaud Raiser's Edge.

Last year we priced other options based on our record count and everything that would work will cost us $30-50k annually. Enter CiviCRM...We have the tech skills to implement it, but it may not be a viable solution since its not one of the "big players" in the Donor DB world - you know the $30-50k/yr ones. Thanks for any help. I really want to give CiviCRM a whirl, but need to make sure

1. What is the income/donation-size of your organization ($10k, 100k, 1M, 10M, 100M)?
2. How many donor records do you currently have (1k, 10k, 100k, 1M, 10M)?
3. What are your top 2 donor Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you track within the CiviCRM reporting capabilities?
4. What are the top 2 strengths you experience with CiviCRM?
5. What are the top 2 weaknesses?
6. How much time per month do you spend customizing reports inside of and outside of CiviCRM, if applicable?
7. How long have you used CiviCRM to date?
8. What CRM database did you use before?
9. If budget wasn't a constraint, would you still use CiviCRM or is there another system you would choose?
10. How many Donor Development employees do you have? How many are power users of CiviCRM? How many are Development officers for fundraising?
11. How do you best track moves management in CiviCRM?
12. Who supports your instance of CiviCRM- you or an external vendor?

Answer 1

We have around 14 million contacts & 35 million contributions. I believe our budget is less than $100 million per year but it's in the ballpark

I think we've used CiviCRM for over 10 years. We did evaluate changing about 4-5 years back and instead used a fraction of the cost of changing to invest in performance fixes & improvements which have been merged to core & resolved the issues we had.

Our top metric is $$ in :-)

We have internal support for CiviCRM & our fundraising technology in general. We do have a part-time developer dedicated to needs around CiviCRM and have maybe 20-30 people on the non-tech side of our fundraising & partnerships team at a guess

Top strength is definitely the fact we can customise the things we want changed. The biggest weakness is probably some aspects of the UI - but we are hoping to support some of the proposed changes to that over the next couple of years

Answer 2

1. What is the income/donation-size of your organization ($10k, 100k, 1M, 10M, 100M)? 2M
2. How many donor records do you currently have (1k, 10k, 100k, 1M, 10M)? 2500
3. What are the top 2 strengths you experience with CiviCRM? The ability to customize it to what we want/need. The price
4. What are the top 2 weaknesses? Ability to handle processing year-end receipts in one set. UI, can be difficult for some users to grasp (but this is also part of the strength because the difficulty stems from the flexibility)
5. How much time per month do you spend customizing reports inside of and outside of CiviCRM, if applicable? Not an issue now that we have things dialed into what we need.
6. How long have you used CiviCRM to date? 3-4 years
7. What CRM database did you use before? Quickbooks but that is not a CRM
8. If budget wasn't a constraint, would you still use CiviCRM or is there another system you would choose? Have no experience with anything else
9. How many Donor Development employees do you have? How many are power users of CiviCRM? How many are Development officers for fundraising? We have 1 Development employee, we have 2 power users,
10. Who supports your instance of CiviCRM- you or an external vendor? Internal

We have used it with WP and now Drupal. I'd go with Drupal over WP in a heartbeat.

Answer 3

I manage 3 sites with CiviCRM. Two for my day job - one for a small volunteer non-profit I am on the board of.

1. What is the income/donation-size of your organization? $500,000, $10,000, $0
2. How many donor records do you currently have? 10K, 500, 0
3. What are your top 2 donor Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you track within the CiviCRM reporting capabilities? Conversions from email to donations, conversions from mail to donation - custom fields for how people heard about us.
4. What are the top 2 strengths you experience with CiviCRM? The community and ability to customize everything.
5. What are the top 2 weaknesses? Lack of SAAS providers (all in one shops with set pricing - like nationbuilder, salesforce, etc), latest features right away may mean that you encounter some bugs, and ill give a third - the amount of time you will take to shop vendors is significantly longer than most one stop shops - but that time spent will be worth it in long run.
6. How much time per month do you spend customizing reports inside of and outside of CiviCRM, if applicable? With some new extensions - like Extended Reports - it has been a lot easier getting the reports just as we want them. We did at times have to get the data from a couple different reports - export them - import them into excel to get them to look how we want them to. Sometimes we have to ask ourselves - is it important to change the way we have things or can we be happy with the reports that Civi spits out - most of the time - we can be happy with the reports Civi spits out.
7. How long have you used CiviCRM to date? 2-3 years
8. What CRM database did you use before? a mix of Excel sheets/mailchimp/eventbrite/Give Wordpress Plugin.
9. If budget wasn't a constraint, would you still use CiviCRM or is there another system you would choose? Likely stay with CiviCRM and pay to improve the product - a $10K investment in CiviCRM can do a whole lot. Take a look at MIH for example.
10. How many Donor Development employees do you have? How many are power users of CiviCRM? How many are Development officers for fundraising? How do you best track moves management in CiviCRM? 1 Development staffer - 2 power users (includes the development staffer)
11. Who supports your instance of CiviCRM- you or an external vendor? For all instances - mostly internal - while I am savvy enough to manage upgrades, backups, maintenance, etc, there are instances where having a consultant or developer available on an hourly basis or retainer is super helpful. Especially when you want things to look a certain way on the front end. Another thing to factor in is your webhost, email provider, payment processor etc - there are non-civicrm vendors that you will have to use for some services - you may already be using some of them

There is a REALLY important question that you did not ask - what is your Content Management System. We use Drupal and Wordpress - both are great platforms - you can also use Backdrop and Joomla - but I have less experience with those. If you are happy with your current site - you should ask questions related to your current CMS. If you are considering a new CMS anyways - then there are pros and cons to both Wordpress and Drupal.

Answer 4

These are great questions, thanks for posting. We have several clients that have made this move and several that are larger. Please see my answers below:

What is the income/donation-size of your organization ($10k, 100k, 1M, 10M, 100M)? -- We have many over 10MM. See this URL for live stats. I believe that many larger orgs are not reporting back

How many donor records do you currently have (1k, 10k, 100k, 1M, 10M)? -- Several over 100K; there is at least one (Wikimedia) with 10MM+

What are your top 2 donor Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you track within the CiviCRM reporting capabilities? -- We tend to integrate Jasper Reporting into CiviCRM; CiviReporting is PHP based and we don't recommend it for our larger clients.

What are the top 2 strengths you experience with CiviCRM? -- Web integration -- still much better than any Nonprofit CRM (this is a weak point of Salesforce unless you want to spend a lot of $$ on Community licenses. -- Solid functionality across almost all core areas (membership, donations, etc.)+ it can be customized to meet your needs less expensively than any other NP CRM.

What are the top 2 weaknesses? -- Reporting -- Interface

How much time per month do you spend customizing reports inside of and outside of CiviCRM, if applicable? -- this varies a lot.

How long have you used CiviCRM to date?
-- 10+ years

What CRM database did you use before? -- varies, but moving from RE is common ; there are a few things RE does better (like bulk importing of donatations from lockboxes, but that can be added. RE also has a more advanced way of dealing with campaigns, but this can be added.

If budget wasn't a constraint, would you still use CiviCRM or is there another system you would choose? -- For our clients, if they have an intense web portal we believe CiviCRM is the best by far. SF is investing a ton of $$ in this, but they are not close yet.

How many Donor Development employees do you have? How many are power users of CiviCRM? -- varies

How many are Development officers for fundraising? -- varies How do you best track moves management in CiviCRM? -- there isn't a lot of good moves management built in, but it can be added. However, RE moves management is not any better. I do think Salesforce kicks everyones butt here. We use our SF expereince to augment CiviCRM.

Who supports your instance of CiviCRM- you or an external vendor? -- We use BackOffice Thinking, they are the best, but I'm biased :)