What is CiviCRM?

CiviCRM is software developed for non-profit and civil society organizations.The ultimate goal of CiviCRM is social good. It is open source. Because CiviCRM is open-source, it’s highly customizable and free to use and develop.

CiviCRM developers are guided by the following values:

• Privacy
• Community
• Quality
•  Openness and flexibility
•  Documentation and support

CiviCRM is designed to manage information about members of the organization, event organizers, members of political parties, NGOs, grant seekers and sponsors, as well as the usual management of the contact base. This contact base includes volunteers, activists, voters, and more general types of business contacts, such as employees, customers, or suppliers, whose contact information can be managed through CiviCRM. CiviCRM stores all data, contact information and event history at one central place. Individuals can sign up for their membership, renew subscriptions, make donations, receive notifications and more.

It is web-based, flexible, and feature-rich out of the box. CiviCRM's core business is managing contacts, relationships, activities, groups, tags and permissions. All these categories are tracked using various CiviCRM services, such as CiviContribute, CiviEvent, CiviMember, CiviCase, CiviGrant, CiviCampaign, CiviPetition, CiviMail,  CiviReport and more.

The possibilities of working with this CRM system are related to the following areas:

• Contacts: create and edit contacts, manage relationships between them.
• Activity Management: meetings, tasks, notes, and attachments all in one place. You can view all the activities connected with each contact.
• Members: create multiple membership levels, set statuses, renew subscriptions, filter lists and send reminders.
• Volunteers: tag and search advocates' availability.
• Grantors: identify grantors, allow grantors to make online payments.
• Grantees: create workflow for evaluating and managing grants.

• Pledges: accept pledges, credit contributions towards pledges.

• Product Management: create product catalogs and manage product items and quantities.

• Contributions: create and collect custom contribution data fields, search contributions by type, amount, date etc. Generate reports/real-time analytics.

• Communications: auto-create addressee/mailing name and salutations (for thank you emails, letters).

• Events: define event types, generate event attendees lists, report on success of events etc.

The CiviMobile application allows users to access their CiviCRM databases anywhere, anytime. The application gives NGOs the ability to manage their contacts, calendar, and events from its database with CiviCRM. There is also a function of scanning a QR-code.

CiviCRM is supported by many hosting companies and professional services. Extensive administrator, developer and user documentation is available on the project website. There are also active forums. CiviCRM helps organizations grow and sustain strong relationships over time.