[GPSCC-chat] CiviCRM for building our party and our web site

[Drew]

When I was working for the Kent Mesplay for President campaign I started to get familiarized with CiviCRM offered by CampaignFoundations.com (originally started by our very own Cameron Spitzer with Hugh Esco.  Now run by Hugh Esco). The CRM stands for "Constituent Relations Management" and what it is is an opensource database of members and donors for campaigns, parties and nonprofits.  Its pretty cool and CRM is how elected officials and political campaigns get their job done.  Carol Brouillet used CiviCRM for her campaign.

With it we can retain info on Greens and Green-leaning voters and citizen supporters.  When we are telephone banking for Jill Stein and Rob Means we can record which people donated and requested more info.  So instead of just writing things down on pieces of paper and then losing them we enter them into the database and start to operate like a serious political party.

Furthermore CiviCRM is integrated with the Drupal CMS (Content Management System)  which makes it easy to manage content for your web site and have it look really good without everyone working on it needing tto have sophisticated web knowledge.  Most anyone after familiarization can work with the blog and the event notification system, etc.

Cameron tried to get us started on this a few years back, but we just didn't get going on learning how to set it up.

So I'm proposing that we hire CampaignFoundations.com to host a CiviCRM site for our county party.  Its $39 / month for the basic service (with $50 setup fee).  I talked to my the Council members, Merriam and Spencer about it today and they were in favor.  So I donated the $89 startup fee and now our site is getting set up.  I'll let you know more as it develops.

Green is GO!

Drew
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