Introduction

Marketing, Donations, CRM, Mailing & Distribution Lists, Membership & Subscriptions

CiviCRM is a Constituent Relationship Management System for Joomla!. Primarly targeting the non-profit and public sectors, this extension enables you to very effectively manage your organization's contacts and related activities, and to build a better connection between your CMS and your constituents, thereby empowering your organization to maximize its impact. CiviCRM is comprised of several core components that extend its data model. These include:


  • CiviContribute: A donation component to accept online payments via PayPal, Stripe, iATS, Authorize.net and many others. Also supports recurring payments.
  • CiviEvent: An event management component for integrated event registration and management
  • CiviMember: A sophisticated membership component to manage your members
  • CiviMail: A high performance broadcast email engine that leverages the open source Mosaico drag and drop email builder
  • CiviPledge: A module to manage pledges
  • CiviCase: Case management for human service providers (with thanks to Physician Health Program - British Columbia)
  • CiviReport: A reporting module to make sense of all the data you collect

Additional features within these components include personal campaign pages, SMS messaging, accounting integration, custom fields and profiles, smart groups, automated messaging, and lots more. Additional functionality is provided via a mature extension ecosystem.

CiviCRM is translated into dozens of languages and benefits from an engaged, passionate community.

If you need help installing this component please consult the service provider list at https://civicrm.org/partners-contributors

Note that the CiviCRM license is AGPL v3 which is compatible with GPLv3.

CiviCRM est un système principalement conçu pour la gestion des associations et des organisations sans but lucratif. CiviCRM vous permet de gérer vos contacts, de faire le suivi des communications, des dons, adhésions, participations à vos événements, et plus encore. Le tout s'intégrant à Joomla!, vous permettant d'intégrer toutes ces fonctionnalités à même votre site web.

Functionality
All you can need about manage contacts, volunteers, events, service cases, foundraising is here; having big personalization possibilities.
Ease of use
Some tech knowledge are needed, it's not a install and play extension.
Support
Good support, sometime it's long to find what you need.
Documentation
Big and exaustive; it could be necessary to tell more about real cases to give ideas about usage.
I used this to: We're using this extension to manage a non profit organization devoted to civil protection in Italy.
Functionality
Nothing bad to say about this extension, it works flawlessly and is child's play to install and configure.
Ease of use
I give this 100/100 only because attention to every detail has not been overlooked in this amazing extension.
Support
Support goes without question way beyond the norm. Very fast to respond without hearing once a '3rd party issue' stock developer's answers.
Documentation
Concise and well thought out, with easy to follow clearly written guides. Something I've come to expect from this talented developer.
I used this to: Social communications and site support for visitors and registered members, which includes... Video chat & conferencing, private and public chat rooms, with integration capabilities for JomSocial, EasySocial, CB and more. Ticket support & offline messaging.

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND!
Functionality
It does what it says and has all of the settings required in backend and it looks great.
Ease of use
It's easy to setup although it took me a little while to understand all the different module settings. Takes some 'trial and error'.
Support
Support is one of the best I have ever seen. It's fast, friendly and very service orientated.
Functionality
almost anything you can think of you can do
Ease of use
It takes time to plan and execute this component
Support
the forums are there, but the culture is technical
Documentation
I used this to: rolodex plus function.
btw it works on joomla 3 without ant problem.

Still half-baked for Joomla



Posted on 17 September 2012
I want to say that I LOVE the idea of what they're trying to accomplish with CiviCRM and the fact that it's free is a testimony to what the open source community can do. It has a TON of features and overall seems like it has the potential to be amazing.



That said, there are definitely some issues.



1. As others have said, the community leans more towards Drupal, and much of the official documentation references Drupal with not a peep about how to do something similar in Joomla.



2. The component is written in such a way as to generate a massive amount of php and js calls. Apparently drupal people have a way to aggregate such calls to not be such a server burden, but Joomla people don't (to my knowledge). In defense of the civicrm people they keep saying their software most likely won't perform great on shared hosting.



3. The mailing component is just ridiculous. It is so complicated to setup and is ridiculously buggy. You have to do cron jobs and all sorts of other things when there are other mailing components that do everything CiviCRM does (and more) and don't require any of this. I've setup ACY mailing in about 30 seconds. No cron jobs. No php. It just works.



One more pet peeve on the mailing. If you it the "send test email" button it sends every time. With no configuration. But I literally had to try 27 different configurations to try to interpret what in the world the documentation was talking about (again, it was written for Drupal) and even then, it is buggy. If you hit the test button and it works, the real thing should work. If it doesn't, delete the test button. It's useless.



4. The donation part of the software was useless too. Every upgrade seemed to break something obscure. Issues with php/js calls, fields disappearing, template conflicts. Joom Donation installs in 30 seconds. Configures in 30 seconds and just works. 3 freaking weeks trying to get their donation thing to work reliably only to find out that IE users were getting weird errors.



Unless you have someone whom installing and maintaining this stuff is their full time job, I would stay away for now. It was literally my full time job for 3 weeks. I would get sooo close to everything working and then I was constantly chasing down bugs. Over and over. You could do pretty much everything CiviCRM does with $100 worth of extensions and save yourself a lot of heartache.
Wanna know the problem with CiviCRM? Go try to use their demo. You'll see guest login info and a place to log in. Do it. Then count the minutes it takes for you to figure out what to do next. Keep looking. Found it yet?



Your customers will have the exact same experience. We've used CiviCRM for years, and it doesn't allow you to set up the same type of transactional experience customers look for now - yes, even customers of poor little nonprofits. They have to create a log-in account before registering for an event. Then they have to back out to start registering for the event itself. We've had people give up on trying to register for our events - a key source of revenue - because they can't click on an event, register, and pay like they can with almost any other online transaction. Sure CiviCRM has some great administrative and database management functions. But, what's the point if the system runs off your customers?
Owner's reply: A few comments:

1. You can set CiviCRM up so that anonymous users can register / contribute. A login is NOT required

2. Most users will add the links to the event / contributon page from various pieces of content (blog post, links on top etc). CiviCRM does not do this for you, and we feel that this is better dealt with at the CMS level. For e.g. see all the links to contributions / events on http://civicrm.org/
I've been running a non-profit using civiCRM for two years now and could never have accomplished what we have without it. I am so grateful.



Indeed, as noted below, version 3.0 and later is much, much improved. You should take reviews from before fall 2009 with a grain of salt.



civiCRM is an endless struggle or impossible on cheap shared hosting. But you really should not be running mission critical functions like your organizations web site on $5 a month hosting. Learned the hard way. (Moving up to $15 a month or so is sufficient at least for my organizations demands.)



Many of the features in civiCRM are really nicely implemented. It also makes some very complex things (sending a finely customized mailing or setting up registration for a paid event, for example) really easy and quick. It is not a simple program, but the complexity it has is complexity you really need to be employing if you are running a non-profit.



CiviCRM is not quite RaisersEdge, but it's definitely more in that direction than a simple database.



Lastly, while civiCRM has improved, this is indeed a big program (yes bigger than Joomla itself) and requires that much more technical attention. It's probably still true that it isn't for the faint of heart. But then, neither is making your non-profit successful! And yes, the support community is strong and pretty committed to helping you figure things out that you need.

Incredible



Posted on 25 July 2010
Simply one of the best extensions available for anyone interested in a crm. Does everything it says it does in as straight-forward a way as possible given the incredible number of features it offers. Plus, it will save you a boatload compared to commercial services.

Immense!



Posted on 10 June 2010
I wrote a negative review two years ago saying this was essentially a buggy Drupal app and to stay away.



With CiviCRM 3.X, it's become a stable, awesome application for Joomla. If there were a rating above "5", I would give it; it's that good.



Clearing up some myths:

The database is NOT messy - it's actually brilliant to anyone who knows databases. Clean design and essential to the incredible flexibility of CCRM. As a single example, the clear distinction and association between Contact and Member records is correct, and contrasts with the messy relationship between these with other Joomla extensions.



The conversion of the DB from MyISAM to InnoDB (required) is a small pain, but well worth the effort and straightforward. About half an hour with phpMyAdmin.



Lobo is tireless and passionate. His leadership is incredible, the guy must not sleep.



The forums are helpful and pleasant. Questions mostly get answered.



The user interface is wonderfully intuitive, so much so that it's almost training free. I needed to read up on only a couple functions to get my clients up and running in a useful fashion.



It only seems complex because the functions are numerous. But there's no fat in it. I give it an unqualified recommendation as of version 3.x.

CiviCRM



Posted on 11 February 2010
I have used this tool and a developer for CiviCRM on several projects, including a major site for Yale University. All I can say is: the best.



There is no finer tool for events, membership and relationship/constituent management. They are committed to improvement, Civi has literally thousands of features, and the team is in this for the long haul.



If you create sites for member-driven enterprises and orgs, Civi is the tool of choice.

CiviCRM

Version:
5
Developer:
CiviCRM LLC
Last updated:
Aug 28 2019
5 years ago
Date added:
Mar 05 2006
License:
AGPL
Type:
Free download
Includes:
c p
Compatibility:
J3
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Uses Joomla! Update System

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