CiviCRM is one of the very few nonprofit focused free and open source applications. It can be a powerful tool for nonprofit organizations. You can use it to track donors, send blast emails, set up events, and do case management. Learn about the details of implementing and using CiviCRM.

Date/Time: Tuesday April 29th, 11:00 AM PT / 2:00 PM ET

This webinar will be conducted by the CiviCRM team, so it is a great opportunity to get all of your questions about CiviCRM answered. Find more detailed info on their blog. Register on the NTEN site.

The next NOSI/NTEN webinar will be on CiviCRM, and will be conducted by the CiviCRM development team. They will give an overview of CiviCRM, examples of its use, and there will be lots of time for questions. Register on the NTEN Site. More details about the webinar are on the CiviCRM blog.

There are a surprising number of open source tools for CRM and fundraising.

The NTEN CRM satisfaction survey showed that people who were surveyed were quite satisfied with the free and open source tools that many of them have chosen to implement. This webinar will be an overview of free and open source CRM tools. You’ll learn about what’s available and how you can implement these tools in your organization.

We'll talk about why use open source tools for CRM, review both desktop and web based tools, and talk about the process of implementation of these tools.

It will be a great introduction to CRM tools in general. There will also be a webinar in April that Focuses on CiviCRM.

This webinar is on March 27th, at 2pm EDT, 11am PDT

Register on the NTEN site

I listened in on the conference call about the merger of Get Active and Convio, because I was curious, and I wanted to find out what the lessons are in terms of both open source options, as well as openness of data. I was pleasantly surprised about how much was talked about in both of these realms. If this had happened a couple of years ago, I doubt much would have been said.

On the call: Gene Austin: Convio, Sheeraz Haji: Get Active, Tom Crackeler: Get Active, Dave Crooke: Convio

They talked about being excited by the openness of the Get Active architecture with Get Active Extensions - they expect to accelerate the openness of the Convio architecture. Sheeraz talked about having both development teams working on opening up the Convio and Get Active systems and APIs

They seem quite committed to provide openings and hooks into their applications that allow clients to get at their data. There was quite a lot of talk about APIs, and integrating the applications with other applications, including Google. They will use the need to move data from Get Active to Convio as a way to create ways to create external transactions and the like that will be opened up completely. Convio uses Salesforce for their customer relations management. They are a big Salesforce user, but they haven't had many requests for integration with Salesforce.

A question was asked about open source - whether they were moving in that direction. David Crooke talked about how they think that open source is a great model for developing software. Both companies use a lot of open source components in their development. They think open source has a lot to offer to the nonprofit sector. They don't envision opensourcing their codebase. The value isn't the software, it's the service.

And in terms of integration with open source CMS systems such as Plone or Drupal, as they develop integration between CRM and CMS we'll also put that in. Talked about Get Active hooks with Plone. They envision doing more like that. It will never be as tightly integrated as the Get Active CMS - but they want to make it possible to have their customers work with whatever CMS they want.

All in all, it was an interesting call. I'm glad I listened in. It provokes the thought of a post on "openness vs. open source" that I'm marinating in my head.