Meeting 24 September 2008 at Community Action Southwark, Elephant and Castle

Network Meeting, 24 September, Community Action Southwark, Elephant & Castle, London

It’s a bit later than we’d like to put the notes out from September’s meeting……A big thank you to all of our guest speakers and riders for making this a great event to network and learn from each other.

CiviCRM - Michael Mc Andrew (Westminster CVS)
Salesforce - Nicole Aebi-Moyo (BOND)
How (and how not!) to run open source -based systems procurement - John Davies (IT4Communities
ICT Handbook - Mike Veitch (HAVS)

We’ll be doing another London Riders event in early December – so if you’d like to take on a guest presenter slot and share some non-profit technology applications that are close to your heart – let us know. We’ll be posting over at UKRiders shortly with a call for your proposals.

To carry on reading notes from the London Riders network event on 24 September go below the fold…

CiviCRM - Michael McAndrew

CiviCRM (http://civicrm.org) is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that you can install on your own webspace - and integrate with free and open source web based content management systems (CMS) such as Drupal (http://drupal.org) or Joomla www.joomla.org).

Michael currently works for Third Sector Design (www.thirdsectordesign.org). He developed a CRM with similar functionality two years ago for a couple of organisations and is now migrating to CiviCRM. Michael is involved in a project to deploy a CiviCRM installation for CVS organisations in partnership with Voluntary Action Westminster (www.vawcvs.org).

Other examples of CiviCRM in action include: VOSCUR (www.voscur.org), GMCVO (www.gmcvo.org.uk), Voluntary Action Rotherham (www.varotherham.org.uk), War Child (http://www.warchild.org.uk), Community Action Southwark (www.casouthwark.org.uk), Association of Volunteer Managers (www.volunteermanagers.org.uk).

Michael also has his own CiviCRM blog and runs a UK user group for CiviCRM developers and users: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,4402.0.html
Project started in early 2008 to redevelop the Voluntary Action Westminster website and build an eco system around so more than one developer can work on it, utilising different skills and availability of developers.
Chose CiviCRM because its functionality did a lot of what was needed out of the box, and attracted by the fact that it was open source. Advantage of CiviCRM is that it is a mature product with a large developer community and the ability to integrate with other source tools.
Resistance – more intensive than Drupal and needs to be hosted on a tailored server.
Reporting – search function that can be customised, new reporting module in development. Currently, most reporting is done by exporting data to MS Access and Excel.
Timescale for the VAW project is to have the CRM database ready by end of September and the CMS website to follow later.
CiviCRM also lacks e-commerce options

Some CiviCRM developers – Circle Interactive, SCIP, Illuminate ICT, ESP Projects

SALESFORCE - Nicole Aebi-Moyo (BOND)

Nicole gave us a demo and talk on how BOND (www.bond.org.uk) came to use Salesforce (www.salesforce.com/uk) – a web based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool for integrating their web and back office database systems.

Started development of a new database and website for BOND in April 2008 with the requirements specification and data cleaning. BOND had previously been using an old Access database which was working to some extent, but not suitable for the website overhaul.

The web development project was well funded with £25,000 each for database and website redevelopment. Nicole put together the specification and received 6 or 7 responses to request for bid. Of those two providers came within budget and both were recommending Salesforce as their preferred solution. BOND’s project has come in under budget and is not likely to be charged next year.

Staff buy-in - demo presentation of Salesforce to the staff team showed mock ups of how it could work, and this instilled confidence that it could meet BOND’s needs.

Free – applied for the free, non-profit version of Salesforce, which is available as a donation to registered charities.

Users need to bear in mind the cost of time and resources needed to customise Salesforce to your own organisations. However, there is a large developer community and good support resources.

BOND used a developer for a number of reasons:

had money
new resource
very involved development

Licencing – Salesforce gave 10 free licences to BOND. They contacted Salesforce direct and had no problem obtaining additional free licences for their staff.

Database hosted is hosted on Salesforce servers - need to check where these are geo-located are for Data Protection reasons.

Upgrades to Salesforce are published every 6 months and are automatically integrated into the system.

Training - Nonprofit Admin Workshop is available for charities at the discounted rate of £300 (standard rate is £1,950)

UK user group http://usergroups.salesforce.com/nonprofits_uk/ based in London to share experience and ideas:

Future plans for BOND – database has gone live, website goes live in November, then integration of the two to follow later.

Nicole also helps run a community orchestra and showed us their implementation of Salesforce. This site was developed for free using Salesforce employees as volunteers.

Note that security verification is needed if trying to access from a new machine
Can create website forms from the database (including redirect page) gives code that can be pasted in to website
Can be used to send mass emails – vertical response (available to download as an add-on)
Data can be exported out of Salesfore to Excel
Need to consider data protection, risk and security issues when client data is being hosted externally, as is the case with Salesforce
Suggested that anyone interested in exploring Saleforce should try trial enterprise version - then fax charity registration number to obtain complete free version.

Bespoke Database development experience - John Davies (IT4C)

John gave us a short talk on IT4Communities’ (www.it4communities.org.uk) experience of managing a bespoke database system designed from the ground up.

The old system was based on a Microsoft .ASP front end using an Access database -never come across any other organisation using such a set-up
Decided to start again as it could not be rescued – IT4C wanted to retain Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) so that it could move away from the developer if needed
The new system was launched system in May 2006 after initially working with one developer.

Problems with first developer meant that to complete the development a second developer was required. Because open code had been used IT4C was able to show sample code to new developers to ensure that it was of a good standard - and developers were happy and able to work with it.

Conclusions

no source code - no payment
incremental delivery enabled verification of code before payments
show previous work and get expert to check code quality
went for a small supplier able to focus better on IT4C’s needs rather than a larger developer with many clients

Where next for IT4C?

move to something like Salesforce or CiviCRM
investigate growing web 2.0 options
go fully open source to a product with a substantial user-base and community of developers

Technical handbook - Mike Veitch (www.havs.org.uk)

Mike Veitch has developed Technical Handbook – a paper-based system that allows organisations to record in one place key details – passwords, router config, contact name at tech support company, web domain renewal dates, etc).

All organisations need the tools to access their ICT resources. The information that has to be stored (eg names and contacts of support organisation, passwords) is often scattered in fragments in different places – this makes it difficult to put together the whole picture.

For small organisations, information is often held by one person - who always needs to be sought to find out information. The question is where to keep this information.

The IT handbook is designed to allow people to gather the small pieces of information

not a computer based solution - paper based A4 folder
contains router configuration etc
information or where the information is located

Currently looking to review and seek funding for print of final version. Organisations will get in electronic form that will be restricted to support organisations and Circuit Riders. Essentially this is an IT system documentation tool but needs a name, suggestions welcome.

Although this tool is separate from a traditional ICT health check it can be used in conjunction to document information from a Health check.

Would like too see electronic version available to those who do support, ie circuit riders, library of components that are useful to organisations you work with

Get Involved…

Will be put on to UKriders (www.ukriders.info) email list as a trial version.

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Thanks to Ian Goodman and Miles Maier at Lasa for taking and writing up the notes of the meeting.