CivicActions Is Proud To Be A Silver Sponsor Of DrupalCon Chicago

CivicActions is proud to be a silver sponsor of DrupalCon Chicago! We have a long history of sponsoring DrupalCons in North America and Europe. Drupal is the industry-leading open source content management platform used to power millions of websites. It’s also a robust community of Web developers, designers, businesspeople, and everyday citizens around the world. At CivicActions we have been developing websites for progressive nonprofit organizations and foundations since 2005. DrupalCon is an international event that brings together the people who use, develop, design, and support the Drupal platform. DrupalCon Chicago will be held March 7-10, 2011, and will feature dozens of curated sessions and panels from some of the most influential people and brightest minds within the Drupal community and beyond, as well as countless opportunities for networking, sprints, informal conversations, and more. Go to http://chicago2011.drupal.org to find out more and purchase your ticket today. Our own Jenn Sramek will be presenting a panel entitled, “Lessons Learned from the Agile Process Applied.” Stella Power will be presenting on the Coder Module, Sumit Kataria will be presening a session on Developing Apps for iPhone iPad and Android using Drupal as a Base System, Andy Laken’s session on Community Based Drupal Training was also selected. If you’d like to learn more about CivicActions, and the work that we do, drop by booth 70 and DrupalCon...

Jumo And A Dunbar Number For Organizations

This morning I read Robin Dunbar’s op-ed in the New York Times, You’ve Got To Have (150) Friends, and it got me thinking more about Jumo (read my initial thoughts on Jumo).  The author’s research into the capacity of people to maintain friendships has resulted in the concept of Dunbar’s Number: that humans can really only maintain 150 relationships with other humans, regardless of what technology purports to allow. This idea raises interesting questions about what technology is actually doing then when we can have infinite number of followers and friends on Twitter, or thousands of “friends” on Facebook or other social networks (with the exception perhaps of the new Path social network which limits you to 50). If a person can only maintain 150 relationships with other people, how many relationships can one maintain with organizations? And if Jumo professes to help connect us with more organizations, when will we hit the equivalent of Dunbar’s Number for organizations? I donate to far more organizations already that I can reasonably keep up with. On Jumo I have followed more than I can actually pay enough attention to to be meaningful. If people max out at 10, or 12, or even 20 organizations, what impact does following even more have on the quality and depth of engagement with all of them? How many ladders of engagement can we climb simultaneously? I’ve talked with people at conferences about Facebook organization fan pages and causes, and the ease with which people can “like” an organization  or “join” a cause — it is so easy that it is practically meaningless.  I’ve suggested that perhaps a user...

Network For Good Online Giving Study

  Network For Good, the online giving portal, just released The Online Giving Study covering 3.6 million gifts totaling $381 million from nearly 1.9 million unique donors to 66,470 nonprofit organizations from 2003 to 2009.  The study only covers giving made through Network For Good’s system. The study is full of great stats, interesting charts, and some lessons for fundraisers and nonprofit organizations considering fundraising tools and portals.  Here are some of the findings that I find most interesting: 64.1% of donations are made through nonprofits’ websites, 25.5% through giving portals and 10.4% through social giving. Donations made through an organization’s website are larger, significantly, than hose made through giving portals, or social giving, and giving habits seem to be formed by the first giving experience. Thus if your first giving experience is through a portal, and you give 33% less than you would of had you given through the charity’s website, you will also give less in the future than if you had first given through the charity’s site because your baseline is lower. Giving through social networks is lowest. This comes as no surprise, anyone who has read accounts of Facebook causes raising less than a dollar per supporter could tell you this.   These 3 statistics are important, especially in light of the recent launch of Jumo, a social network for good, that I blogged about yesterday.  Jumo uses Network For Good’s donation processing system, so hopefully in the future Network For Good will be able to tell us something about giving habits through Jumo.  But in the mean time, if Jumo is helping move people...

Two Weeks With Jumo: My First Impressions Of The Social Network For Social Change

Since its launch on November 30th, I’ve spent some time playing around with Jumo (it is definitely worth reading the about page) and reading other people’s accounts of their explorations of the new social network for social causes founded by Facebook cofounder and Obama 2008 Online Organizing Directory Chris Hughes. At least in the nonprofit technology sector (perhaps echochamber) the accounts all seem to be pretty similar: What’s the point? Do organizations need another profile on another site to maintain? Will Jumo do any better at motivating people to take real action rather than virtual action? (Malcolm Gladwell’s  “Small Change” article seems rather relevant here.) I waited to blog about Jumo because I was hoping something would “happen” that would make Jumo’s raison d’etre obvious. But in the first few weeks nothing has emerged.  And every time I visit the site, I find myself wondering what I should do there. Sure, I can read dispatches from organizations I have chosen to follow, see suggestions of organizations I might be interested in, but neither solves a problem I actually had. Each day I get perhaps dozens of emails from organizations, some I have strong relationships with (I’ve donated many times), others weak (I signed a petition or some other online action). Just about whenever I log on to Twitter, or Facebook I see a link to another organization or campaign that someone in my network thinks I (or people that follow them) might be interested in.  The problem I have is definitely not one of finding out about organizations, or what they are doing. I would presume that most people...

Using Price Sets In CiviCRM

We are getting ready to launch a site for a client that makes heavy use of CiviCRM and CiviEvent.  During a pre-launch training on CiviCRM the client asked about best practices for using price sets. Each year the organization runs multiple events that have a variety of prices, but from year to year the prices change, and they wanted to know if they should change the prices in a price set or create a new price set. So here are some tips on using price sets in CiviCRM, this post does not explain the specific of configuring price sets, rather higher level ideas about planning how you are going to use them.  The benefits of using price sets is, in part, that if you use the same set of prices for multiple events you do not need to re-enter them each time, the same goes for using price sets on contribution pages.  It is important to note that when a site user makes a donation and contribution record is stored in the database. This records the amount of the contribution and the “source” or contribution page used to make the donation. If a user registers for an event online that requires payment, two records are created, one for the “contribution” or payment, and another for the “participant record”. This second record, the participant record, stores (among other things) the “fee level” which is essentially the “label” of a particular price in the price set.  It also stores the amount that the user paid when they registered for the event.  If you subsequently change the amount associated with that “fee...