The following email arrived today from Peter Davis of fuzion.co.nz. It may be of interest to community organisations.

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We know that many NGOs and community groups are not benefiting from some of the integrated online features that can make managing an organisations contacts more straightforward.

Features such as enabling people to register direct for events without having to reply to e-mails or logging in to websites; renewing directly from a link in an email, without risking creating duplicate contacts etc.

Therefore, I wanted to let you know about an application to the Digital Strategy Community Partnership Fund which would provide funding to help more users in the not-for-profit sector to take advantage of an open source contact management tool — civiCRM.

The first round of documentation has to be delivered on November 10th 2008 and while this timeframe is now incredibly tight there is always the option of organisations becoming involved further down the track.

The funding application is being made to help enable the non-profit sector to benefit from a fully-feature, flexible, open source 'contact' management tool. The funding would subside data migration, training, implementation and support for those NGOs that choose to be a part of the project.

Being open source means civiCRM has no licensing costs or support obligations, and there is a strong community of developers adding new features.

We have implemented civiCRM for both simple and highly complex organisations in New Zealand and know that it is a robust and capable system.

We are very keen to help other NGOs know of its existence and enjoy the benefits of having a product that can effectively manage their

• membership
• fundraising
• contact management
• internal organisational systems
• events
• bulk emailing and much more.

I would of course be very happy to show you what civiCRM is capable of, should your organisation be keen to learn more, regardless of the outcome of this funding proposal.

However, at present we are particularly keen to get some 'letters of support' from the non-profit sector so that we may get funding to assist with several aspects

• develop a series of resources to facilitate adoption of CiviCRM by other non-profit and community user groups
• encourage the expansion of the community of CiviCRM users in New Zealand, with a view to benefit from economies of scale
• run a series of CiviCRM Workshop Series that would cover implementation, system manager training, data migration, user training
• ensure there are affordable CiviCRM Shared Hosting & Installation Services.

We are also hoping we will be able to develop a community of learning of CiviCRM users in the New Zealand non-profit sector, to ensure continued sharing of knowledge and best practices.

An additional outcome would be to set up the first annual New Zealand CiviCRM User Group Meeting, to provide an opportunity for mutual learning and sharing of experiences and successes.

To help support the application we are looking to get letters of interest from within the non-profit sector.

Please contact Peter (peter.davis [@] fuzion.co.nz if you want to discuss providing such a letter.

Read more about civiCRM at www.civicrm.org.

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