We believe the ability to communicate effectively with your community is an invaluable asset.  Consequently, we encourage many of our clients to secure their community's contact information in an open source constituent relationship management system called CiviCRM.

In fact, Community Builders is the leading Australian developer of CiviCRM based applications, including a module to send and log SMS messages to your contacts directly within CiviCRM.

Read about how the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is "adopting CiviCRM for its own use, and actively encouraging other nonprofit organizations to do the same".

What is CiviCRM

CiviCRM is an open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

CiviCRM is a powerful contact, fundraising and eCRM system that allows you to record and manage information about your various constituents including volunteers, sponsors, donors, employees, clients, vendors, etc. Track and execute donations, transactions, conversations, events or other communications with each constituent and store them all in one, easily accessible and manageable source.

Why use CiviCRM?

• "CiviCRM is free 'as in freedom' software, so you and your organisation can finally be in full control of your own data and communications
• Unified view of every constituent. Store information about individuals, organisations and households and your interactions with them.
• Strong open source community. A rapidly growing open source community of developers, consulting firms, consultants and others support, extend and maintain the software.
• Designed for the civic sector. CiviCRM was designed from the ground up for organisations that engage in advocacy, community and political organising, and non-profit work.
• Seamless integration with web sites. CiviCRM integrates directly into the popular open source Content Management systems - Drupal and Joomla!. Registration and visitor interactions are logged directly into the system, including end-user maintenance of their own addresses and custom fields.
• Internationalised & Localised. CiviCRM was built from the ground up as a product intended to be used globally. It can store data in many localised formats and has been translated into a number of languages - including French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese...
• Open source & open standards. Licensed under the GNU AGPL, users can make any modification to the software, can benefit from modifications made by others and can effectively interoperate with other applications.
• Affordable and cost effective. CiviCRM is available without a license fee and is supported by a community of nonprofit-focused consultants.
• Optional components like CiviContribute, CiviEvent, CiviMail, and CiviMember give you more ways to connect with and engage your supporters.

What CiviCRM can do?

• Segmentation Tools. Use groups, simple and searchable tags, and/or relationships to segment constituents.
• Extensive Configurability. CiviCRM is highly configurable, allowing you, in most cases, to configure it to work with your existing business processes. Unlimited locations, addresses, phone numbers, emails and custom data fields allow most unique needs to be met.
• Contacts. Store common nonprofit contact data (individuals, organizations, and households) that support donor management, case management, voter, and advocacy applications.
• Relationships. Understand the relationships between any two contacts with standard (volunteer, employer, head of household) relationships or create your own unique custom relationship types.
• Activities. Record standard activities (phone call, meeting, email) for any contact or create your own custom activities that meet your needs. External software can use the CiviCRM Application Programming Interface (API) to register activities with any contact, providing a comprehensive central repository of CRM information.
• Smart Groups. Create smart groups based on any search criteria or create standard groups that are simply lists of contacts. The membership of a smart group changes automatically according to that moment’s search results.
• Custom Data. Create unlimited custom data fields in virtually any format, including radio buttons, drop-down menus, etc. All custom fields are searchable and can define a smart group.
• Support Multi-site Organizations and Networks. Centrally store data across multiple organizations or web sites.
• Import and Export Functionality with De-duping. Import functionality intelligently maps CiviCRM fields to imported data and checks for duplicates based on user-defined criteria.
• Permissions. With Drupal integration, access to certain groups of contacts can be limited to specific users, offering a way for volunteers to manage small portions of a larger CiviCRM database.
• Website Integration. CiviCRM is integrated with both Drupal and Joomla. Web site registrations automatically become CiviCRM records and individuals can maintain their own CRM record.
• Application Programming Interface (API). CiviCRM offers a fully documented API exposing all major functionality. For instance, you can search the database, register interactions with constituents, create or update contact information, etc. This allows CiviCRM to realistically be a central repository of virtually any nonprofit’s CRM information.

How can we help?

While you can download CiviCRM for free here, we can provide the experience and technical knowledge to get it up and running quickly, to suit your workflow.

• Our team has more than 4 years experience with CiviCRM and the associated Drupal and Joomla! CMS systems, and have participated in the only Australian CiviCRM Boot Camp.
• We have plenty of experience with the installation, configuration and upgrading of CiviCRM, from version 1.5 through to the latest version (currently 3.x). 
• We offer a fully hosted service so you don't have to worry about CiviCRM's hosting requirements or the configuration difficulties experienced with some third-party hosts.
• We not only provide installation/support to our clients, but also advanced development and integration through CiviCRM's API, to meet our clients' specific requirements.