Explore CiviCRM

Tech circle Technological Architecture
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When discussing about mass mail distribution options, at the Element chat channel, @Graham reminded us that CiviCRM might be worth considering, he’s using it for several collectives, and 11000 other collectives around the world do so. It might not be the most modern webapp, but it does do interesting things.

@3wc also added to that making clear that the fact that Civi was initially integrated with Drupal, and we may work with WordPress is a separate issue, and shouldn’t disturb us.

Indeed, CiviCRM, even though it started as an extension to Drupal, since 2012 it is also an integration option for WordPress. So letś consider this as a separate decision from the WP website.

If I understand correctly, CiviCRM would synch WP users with CiviCRM and we should be able to have all users_members on the WP website (SSO integrated with the user account management server) and then do the relationship management (CRM) in Civi, synched with these users. You can imagine that?

While I’m not really familiar with Civi, from what I read in the documentation we could imagine the following (and please shoot at it, ad to it):
-> how would users ask for support? the support mail would feed into Civi and we would do what they call ‘case management’? would that have the function of a ticketing system?
-> how would leads get into these workflows - if they are not a member or user yet?
-> using tags and keywords we could indicate which people have which interests, in a kind of needs & offers database, and once we want to bring people about a certain topic together, we mail all those with the tag
-> multiple people could be linked to an organisation : I wonder how that works in practice, would need to have some demo
-> mass emails for newsletters and so is a clear need we could fulfil with Civi (that’s how we go this thread started)
-> how about contributions and payments? I figure that Civi handles these things, so we should be able to expose that to the WP website. In the mid term I’d hope we can have an integrated UI where our users can sign up, change contribution levels, define their user profile, pose support requests, signup for events, access the different services though one website at meet.coop.

Would this make sense with CiviCRM, and how well, or would there better or easier solutions to work towards these goals?

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We at Agaric would be very interested in helping with this whatever technology stack we go with. We have done CiviCRM for clients on-and-off for more than a dozen years, and are starting to move from experimenting with it for ourselves to actually using it.

A local real estate investment cooperative, Minneapolis Northside Investment Cooperative Enterprise recently asked me about somewhat similar needs. I mentioned Tendenci as probably the most out-of-the-box libre software solution.

But this is all very much a need of mass-base cooperatives, including cooperative platforms, and we have strong interest in serving this space including for initiatives we are involved, such as Meet.coop, Social.coop, and offering websites as a service, cooperatively owned and LibreSaaS, one of the initial and still slow-burning visions of Drutopia.

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