After stumbling on the new Civicspace On Demand demo late last week, I got this public announcement from the Civicspace team:
CivicSpace On Demand, our CivicSpace service (ASP), is in production with customers and offers:
Turnkey online fundraising, email marketing, website and supporter database. No installation and upgrade hassles. All Drupal/CiviCRM upgrades are automatic. No servers to maintain. You access CivicSpace On Demand via your web browser. Blast email & donations up and running in minutes.
I had already given the on-line demo a whirl -- considering it for a few key clients -- and found it to be fast, responsive, and easy-to-use. Some of the interface improvements for this version are spectacular and well-tailored to the needs of NGOs. However, as has always been the case, Civicspace remains a US-centric system in many ways.
That said, as I've done with the Kleercut.net site for Greenpeace, it's fairly straightforward to make it more friendly for Canadian organizations, including the option of making the public Web site bi-lingual. And, with the addition of CiviCRM and CiviContribute, it's a powerful tool for municipal election campaigns among other things.
I'm dying to give the new "on demand" product a try on a real campaign: any ideas? ;-)
Comments
2 Comments
How is it US centric?
With 3 Canadians on the team, and one American moving to Alaska you would think we could be more Canadian friendly. What can we do to improve?
We switched from Yahoo geocoding to Google Geocoding recently so...
Kieran
Let me count the ways...
Hey there Kieran,
Thanks for the ping. Indeed, Civicspace has improved dramatically over the last two years -- so kudos to your and your team -- and, as noted in my post, I'm anxious to put Civicspace on Demand to use with an organization that needs that kind of functionality, and reliability.
For Canadian groups, here are my suggestions (Just off the top of my head -- and meant as constructive input) :
Make Internationalization available: and point people to some basic How-to informatioin on getting basic content translation up-and-running (most large campaigns in Canada are going to need to be bi-lingual).
Separate the Provinces from the States in all CiviCRM-related select lists: we're used to seeing them either before or after the states (not intermixed) -- so it would be good to follow that convention.
Postal code to "riding" look-up: similar to the US Zip code to district look-up, it would be great to see a similar database availble in Canada. (Of course, I'm not asking Civicspace for this -- there are many folks up here working on it -- but I hope that it will integrate when it does become available!)
All that said: Civicspace is an incredible tool kit for any organizatoin and I'll be promoting it widely, and hopefully helping you to push it further into the hands of Canadian organizations.
Best,
Phillip.