Why is CivicSpace offering hosted profiles?

CivicSpace was one of the most popular Drupal distributions that allowed for pre-configuration of Drupal and provided additional themes. Through our experience working on the open source distribution we learned that the greatest challenges web site administrators faced was installing, configuring, and most importantly updating thier site.

Got a call today from a very interesting potential customer.

They basically wanted to outsource their fundraising. Someone to do their data entry, maintain their donor database, generate their mass postal mailings, etc.

So I thought there would be the perfect business for an CivicSpace Associate (someone who resells the CivicSpace On Demand product).

1. Sell something other than software. In this case you are selling data management and administrative skills.
2. Use CivicSpace On Demand as a "perk." Paying $1000 per month for outsourced data management is possible for a lot of Nonprofits. As an associate, you can absorb the $50/mo Groundswell Professional as a differentiator... customers will come to you becuase you offer something unique and valuable (a web-based donor management system).
3. Leverage web-based. You can have clients from all over the country since both you and your clients can access their donor database via the web.
4. Build skills in business processes, not technology. Knowing Drupal or CiviCRM is not really all that interesting. An associate should know how to use Drupal for building a resource directory, know CiviCRM as a donor database, know CiviCRM for case management, etc.
5. Create alliances with adjacent skills. You do data management, someone else does web design... together you double your customer base.

Doing the math, I calculated revenue for one person charging a set of nonprofits $1000/mo to do their donor data management. 5 customers and you make $60K/yr. 10 customers $120K year. Might be a good business...

So we wrote a little how to guide for creating a member directory on your Groundswell or Groundswell Pro site.

It takes a little time. If you understand Drupal/CiviCRM, plan on 15 minutes. If you understand it a little, plan on an hour. If you are just getting started, plan on a couple of days to explore the different things we use... Profiles, Listings, Smart Groups, User Registration, etc. You should still be able to go through the step by step guide and get stuff working.

On Thursday, a 3 second power outage at our hosting facility caused a brief outage of the CivicSpace On Demand service. This happened again over the weekend. These same outage impacted well known services like Technorati.

Our hosting facility is equipped with a state-of-the-art battery backup system and backup generators, so this power outage should not have happened. Unfortunately, the brief outage was caused by a hardware failure in their battery backup system that momentarily brought down the protection circuits. The hosting facility has been very responsive and is actively working to prevent this from ever happening again.

We are happy to report our high availability configuration behaved as designed to safeguard data and minimize down time. Servers rebooted themselves, unfortunately the order of their reboot required staff to visit our data center to complete the final step of bring the service online. Learning from our beta period, we have changed the order in which the servers re-boot so our customers should not even notice an outage in the case of a brief power failure in the future.

 NetSquared, Get Active & Seth Godin at Squidoo have selected CivicSpace on their list of the 59 smartest nonprofit organizations online today.

"These organizations are winners because of their web 2.0 smarts and a willingness to engage their constituents far beyond asking them to dig into their pockets.

These are organizations that give their volunteers and members a voice and get out of the way. They're pros at mobilizing awareness online. They're experimentors. Innovators. On a mission. They're fearless."

Idealware just listed their top articles for 2006. At CivicSpace, we've been working on building an affordable open source infrastructure for small groups for the past couple years. It is nice to see the functionality of CivicSpace On Demand well addresses the pain small groups and nonprofits are feeling.

CivicSpace On Demand is a flexible platform for meeting the web needs of nonprofit and civic groups. One of those common needs is petitions.

There are a couple of petition sites, Care2, ipetition and petitiononline, for example, that allow you to create petition, but what if you could do the same thing seamlessly integrated into your website, online fundraising tool, email marketing and supporter database? This is how you do it with CivicSpace On Demand.

(0) Supporter Database Housekeeping

One thing to think about before creating your petition is whether you need any custom fields. Let's say your petition is to draft Barack O'bama into running for president. You want to know who is willing to put a yard sign up (with a radio button, drop down or other custom filed). You'll need to create that custom field ahead of time.

For our petition, I'm going to offer a comment box, so I'll need to create a custom field: "Petition:Support Affordable Civic Technology Comment12082006"

Another thing you'll want to do is create a CiviCRM group. The title of my group is going to be "Petition:Support Affordable Civic Technology12082006". This will help me keep track of things in 5 or 6 years when I've run hundreds of petitions and my CRM system has a lot of data in it.

(1) Create a CiviCRM Profile.

Profiles can be used for all kinds of stuff... event registration, volunteer signups, newsletter sign ups, etc. But today we'll use it for a petition.

I'll give mine the title "Support Affordable Civic Technology".

I'm going to enable my profile just for "Profile" and "Search Results". This way I can have people sign my petition (the profile selection) and I can easily see my signatures in a report (the search results selection).

I'll limit listings to the group "Petition:Support Affordable Civic Technology12082006" so that I can show a public page of everyone that signed the petition.

I'll also add contacts to group "Petition:Support Affordable Civic Technology12082006" so that I can keep track of everyone that signs the petition.

In the preform help bock, enter your petition text. This can have HTML, images, whatever you want. This gives you good control over the look and feel of your petition text.

You can enable CAPTCHA to lower the possibility of spam. Mapping is integrated in case you want to be able to map who signed your petition.

(2) Decide what data you will collect

You can collect as much or as little data from your signers as you choose by picking among existing CiviCRM fields or among custom fields you create.

We're going to make this really easy, just first name, last name, email and a comment field. If I wanted location data I could add a zipcode field.

So I click "View and Edit Fields" for my profile "Support Affordable Civic Technology" and add my fields. Because I want to create public list of signers, I am going to set the visibility of first and last name to "Public User Pages and Listings". I want to keep people's email addresses private, so I set that visibility to "User and User Admin Only". I also need to remember to mark first name and last name "In selector" so they display correctly in my list of signers.

(3) Decide how you are going to distribute your petition.

With CivicSpace On Demand you have three basic choices: (a) the default URL (b) an alias or (c) stand alone HTML.

Every profile has a default URL in the form of <root>/civicrm/profile/create?reset=1&gid=3 [where gid=3, indicates profile #3]

I don't really like the default URL, so I can create an alias with CivicSpace On Demand to <root>/comtech

Alternatively, I can just grab the stand alone HTML code for the profile and create a widget, place it on other websites, of just create an html page at <root>/commtech

Viewing petition signers is the same process, the default URL being <root>/civicrm/profile?reset=1&gid=3 [where gid=3, indicates profile #3]

(4) Managing sign ups.

If you want to see everyone that signed your petition, you just look at the members of "Petition:Support Affordable Civic Technology12082006"

If you want to send them an email, just fire up the CiviMail wizard. If you want to segment you list by petition signers in zip code 94*, just do an advanced search (assuming you collected postal code info.

TIP: Anoymous signers. A simple way to give petition signers the option to be anonymous is to add a custom yes/no field. Ask them Anonymous? yes/no. Create a smart groups of all people in the "Petition:Support Affordable Civic Technology12082006" group AND custom field Anonymous=No. Use that smart group in step 2 for "limit listings to group". That way anyone who wants to be anonymous will not be listed as a petition signer.

Steve Borsch has some nice things to say about CivicSpace:

Civicspace is an on-Drupal built community offering that also has potential and is, frankly, a significantly more solid step forward than what anyone else -- including Spikesource -- has yet done. Yes it's an assemblage of different functionality, but at least Drupal is architected so that the value of the open source CMS can be easily extended and thus modules can be added to increase the value of a Civicspace deployment.

CivicSpace has always been about creating the 80% solution... solutions for social change that regular people can afford and deploy. One of the really exciting frontiers for social change are small group fundraising sites.

Imagine a web community where artists can create microsites and raise money and build community for arts projects. Imagine soccer teams creating microsites within a soccer portal, raising money for uniforms. Imagine a portal for campus democrats where each chapter can raise a little money for projects.

The fundraising side of this has been explored by companies like Chipin and Fundable. DonorsChoose, Kiva and Global Giving have shown the way with online communities using microsites for fundraising projects.

We are happy to represent Drupal in the NTEN and Idealware Software Review Series: Comparing Open Source CMS's.

With the recent tie between Joomla and Drupal in the 2006 Packt Open Source CMS Award (Joomla won the tie-breaker) and CiviCRM as a finalist for the Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest, we are proud to bring such a powerful open source platform for fundraising, email marketing, websites and online communities to CivicSpace On Demand Users.