Developer(s) CiviCRM LLC Operating system | Written in PHP 5.3+ | |
 | ||
Initial release March 2005; 12 years ago (2005-03) Stable release 4.7.7 / May 4, 2016; 9 months ago (2016-05-04) Type Customer Relationship Management | ||
CiviCRM (/ˈsɪvɪ ˌsiːɑːrˈɛm/ SI-vi-SEE-ar-EM) is a web-based, open source, internationalized suite of computer software for constituency relationship management, that falls under the broad rubric of customer relationship management. It is specifically designed for the needs of non-profit, non-governmental, and advocacy groups, and serves as an association management system. CiviCRM is designed to manage information about an organization's donors, members, event registrants, subscribers, grant application seekers and funders, and case contacts. Volunteers, activists, voters as well as more general sorts of business contacts such as employees, clients, or vendors can be managed using CiviCRM.
Description
CiviCRM's core tracks contacts, relationships, activities, groups, tags and permissions, while its components keep track of contributors (CiviContribute), events (CiviEvent), member lists (CiviMember), cases (CiviCase), grants (CiviGrant), campaigns (CiviCampaign), petitions (CiviPetition), bulk mailings (CiviMail) and reports (CiviReport).
CiviCRM is deployed in conjunction with either the Drupal, Joomla! or WordPress content management systems (CMS), and is supported by many hosting and professional services companies. Both the Drupal and Joomla! professional associations use CiviCRM. CiviCRM's license is the GNU AGPL 3.
CiviCRM version 4.7 supports Drupal 7 and 6, Joomla 3.x and 2.5 and WordPress 3.4. There are a wide and growing number of integration modules with these CMSes to leverage their strengths. A large number of tokens are available for inclusion in HTML or plaintext emails, or for producing PDF files for printing. Data integration formats supported include RSS, JSON, XML, and CSV. Supported programming interfaces include REST, server PHP and client JavaScript APIs, a CMS-agnostic extensions framework and Drupal style hooks.
Two books are available on the software. Extensive admin, developer and user documentation is available on the project site. There are also active forums and an IRC channel.
CiviCRM is used by many large NGOs including Amnesty International, Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, and the Wikimedia Foundation for their fundraising. There are also cases of very large record sets being used with one company claiming to have set up CiviCRM with a set of over 3 million constituents. CiviCRM is also used by Kabissa to provide CRM capabilities to over 1,500 organizations, mostly in Africa.
CiviCRM downloads are available from SourceForge, where it was 'project of the month' for January 2011.