Digital Arts Service Corps - civicrm

End of April at CMC

Colleen Beach — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:05:15 +0000

Haven't done a field report in a long time (again). The password to this thing always seems to get funky and then it gets put off until later. That's the best excuse I have at the moment.

CMC is just starting to get it's first email newsletter together using the civiCRM. That will go out on Wednesday if everyone gets their pieces for it in on time. In reality it'll probably go out next Monday, but I'm telling everyone to get stuff to me by Wednesday.

I cannot recommend CiviCRM highly enough. It's free and relatively user friendly. Although some of the admin type set up (especially for using CiviMail and having it send out email blasts) can be a bit of a headache. But it's really helped everyone at the office get all their contacts in one place so we can actually see who knows who and find them easily.

The budget we had for updating our Ruby on Rails site for the after school program turned out to be mostly imaginary so that site has been sitting mostly stagnant since I got here. I'm trying to learn some Ruby on Rails in between other stuff, but it's sort of on the back burner.

It's allergy season here and making me somewhat miserable. I had to go to the doctor the other day because my lungs were apparently only working about half as good as they were supposed to be. So they have me on some inhalers now so I can breathe again. Although I'm still sneezing and all that good stuff. Good old valley pollution.

I also just got myself promoted from fresh meat to Rock 'n Rolla Girl on my roller derby team (http://www.ccaderby.com/). Our first bout is in June so I'm looking forward to that. I have my very own Union Jack helmet now and lots of bruises.

And through my derby team I've found a circus arts fire troupe and am teaching them hoop dance (they've got a fire hoop on order) and they're teaching me poi. I even got to play with some fire fans the other week.

I also managed to snag a low-income ticket to Burning Man! That's not until August but I'm already super excited! (Applications for low-income tickets are still open until the end of May it'd be cool to have other VISTAs there).

The Januaries

Rich Beckermeyer — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:43:45 +0000

This Month's Work
Another full month of projects and programs. We had our annual staff retreat where Colleen did a training on how to enter data into CiviCRM (which we used for our holiday mailing of 5700+ addresses between our two offices) among other marketing, communication and organization specific activities. We laid the groundwork to begin two seminar series in Sacramento (an interactive youth centric one and another that's technology focused). Furthermore, we are working on connecting our two youth run business initiatives (which we will be meeting with the other office in February to discuss and action plan) and making it a more prominent aspect of our organization's website.

Challenges
Challenges up until now have been project related. Knowing what expectations, goals and who my counterparts are as well as who has the ultimate say. What I created was an internal Work Order Form so people can know who is in charge of what and the steps that need to happen to get a product finished as well as a way to focus projects into more manageable tasks.

Coming Months
I am in charge of several projects in the coming months: creating a sponsorship packet and raising funds for our upcoming annual Premiere in May, designing an annual report and creating a video about our afterschool program California Voices to be used for marketing and enrollment purposes.

What is CiviCRM?

Morgan Sully — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 17:11:11 +0000

CiviCRM is actually a suite of tools based on the Drupal content management system. A bit tricky to set up (at first), but once configured and running it is VERY powerful. It allows NPOs to coordinate their efforts quite well and collects has good set of tools for this. Some key things it attends to is:

Volunteer coordination
Event coordination
Donor management
eNewsletter management
Constituent relationship management
Google/Yahoo mapping of various events and volunteers

It also includes blogs, forums and image galleries and there’s a good base of users out there. The listservs are very friendly too. Here's a link:

http://www.civicrm.org

There is a fantastic, FREE, and pretty comprehensive online manual for CiviCRM available at FLOSSmanuals: http://en.flossmanuals.net/CiviCRM/