CiviCRM has one of the most active and friendliest communities I have come across. From initial tentative forum posts I was encouraged into engaging more actively through IRC and directly with other groups & individuals and am now happy to count many community members as friends. I recently found an article on the web that said if you post a question about CiviCRM anywhere on the web Lobo will post an answer within a few hours. It often feels like that is true.

One of the most valuable way in which the community supports me is by allowing me to bounce my ideas around and often someone is able to suggest an approach which is better than mine.

Its great to work on a project that has a profound impact on non profits. I am very excited about the work we do on CiviCRM which involves building on each other's ideas to create best of breed solutions for non profits. The fact that CiviCRM is an open source project with an amazing community and dedicated developers is an icing on the cake.

The CiviCRM community is a very friendly and helpful community. Whatever the challenge, I always get enough help from the forum or IRC to nudge me in the right direction. For me joining in a CiviCRM sprint once or twice a year is the best, meeting other community members in real life, sharing successes, challenges, problems and meals :-) Seriously, I think the active community is one of the serious assets of CiviCRM and I am proud to be part of it! And when I grow up I promise to do more :-)

ISBA is an international non-profit society with members from all over the world. We have sections that represent different scientific areas and chapters that represent different regions of the world. Civi Member powers our membership system! We use CiviEvent for Conference and Workship registration, and utilize CiviPetition for creating new sections to our society through member petitions. We are epxloring how CiviGrants can be used to track our travel awards and look forward to features for integrating accounting and finance. As a growing non-profit CiviCRM plays a major role in managing our membership system!

If it weren't for CiviCRM we'd be using at least 5 different
systems for Woolman: one for donor management, another for email newsletters, a third for our school enrollment, a fourth for our summer camp registration, and then a whole bunch of spreadsheets for keeping track of things like event attendance, prospective students, CSA memberships, etc. And of course none of those systems would talk to each other or make it possible to get a whole picture of the many ways one person might participate in our education center's activities. Migrating all of our scattered data and disparate systems to CiviCRM was a long and challenging process, but the results have been more than worth it. Our ability to track and report on our programs has improved dramatically, while the burden on staff to do data entry has been greatly reduced, and our participants are happy that they can now register/enroll online rather than mailing or faxing paper forms.