Using CiviCRM to change the world... one city at a time
CiviCon North-West Europe 2016
Kevin Levie | 26-05-2016
KevinLevie
kevin@levity.nl
Topics
- (Who am I? Where am I? Who are all these people?)
- Woonreferendum as an example of how CiviCRM can be used to run social campaigns and grow their support base
- How tech lowers the hurdle for activists and organisations to use local and national referendums 'for good'
- Pros and cons of running Wordpress + Gravity Forms + CiviCRM and (desirable) future developments
- A short look at campaign tools like CiviEngage & CiviVolunteer that are out there and that you can start using right now
Petitions and referendums
- Citizens' Initiatives: 40,000 signatures in NL (nuclear weapons PAX, Pharaoh of The Netherlands), ECI: 1,000,000 signatures
- Referendums in NL: EU Constitution 2005, Ukraine april 2016
- Referendum as a campaign strategy: non-binding corrective ref. requires 300,000 signatures (or a parliament majority)
- Local referendums: 10,000 signatures in Rotterdam, 27,000 in Amsterdam, similar rules for city or district polls elsewhere
- New in NL: collecting signatures online (GeenPeil), lowers the hurdle for activists and organisations to organise referendums
- Inherently conservative, or usable for progressive causes?
(immigration, 'NLexit' vs TTIP, healthcare cuts, housing) - GeenPeil code on Github (in Go), OpenECI, Woonreferendum (Wordpress+CiviCRM, code will be available soon)
Woonreferendum
- Social housing in NL: large sector used to provide good housing to large part of the population, now increasingly only accessible to low income households
- 'No city hates their current inhabitants as much as Rotterdam': 194.700 'affordable' homes in 2000, 167.600 in 2014, city proposing further reduction to 148.000 by 2030
- Referendum campaign supported by local tenants' and residents' organisations and political parties (esp. the SP)
- We need to get 10,000 citizens of Rotterdam who are eligible to vote to support the referendum petition by June 22
- Demo time!
Live site: woonreferendum.nl Demo site: wpcivi.levity.nl
Background information in Dutch: medium.kevinlevie.nl
Doing a world of good
- NGOs often stuck between Excel sheets and Mailchimp,
and vendor lock-in / expensive SaaS CRMs - CiviCRM offers a way out: used at more and more organisations for memberships, donations, mailings, etc.
- Next step: integrating CiviCRM with digital campaign strategy
- MAF and Amnesty doing interesting work (donor journeys, automation, data analysis, ...)
- Not that many examples (that I know of) yet of European social issue or election campaigns using CiviCRM
- Data-driven campaigns still in its infancy in Europe generally, compared to US presidential elections 2008 / 2012 / 2016
(Dutch parties slowly adopting lessons from Obama 2008)
Doing a world of good
- Ideally, CRM and digital presence are centre of campaign, central means to engage more people both online and offline.
'Make digital pivotal'.
- Drupal / Wordpress + CiviCRM can be powerful toolset to build strong online campaigns, experiment with what does and doesn't work, systematically grow support base and dataset
- Tools you can start using (or help develop) right now:
- CiviCampaign + CiviSurvey / CiviPetition / CiviEngage (demo)
Surveys, phone-banking, petitions, get-out-the-vote - CiviCampaign Dashboard (Systopia, demo)
- CiviVolunteer 2.0 (currently only working on Drupal?, demo)
List volunteer roles/needs, sign up, day rosters, log attendance - CiviRules, custom extensions (E-Advocacy US, Woonref, ...)
CiviCRM + Wordpress
- Drupal+CiviCRM: currently better support and more features (Webform, Views). But WP integration has come a long way.
- 25% of CiviCRM installations worldwide run on Wordpress
- 26,4% of all websites worldwide run Wordpress (= opportunity)
- Non-technical users + capitalism = curious ecosystem
(but commercial plugins/themes still licensed under GPL!)
- WP Profile Sync
- WP Member Sync (roles/capabilities), BuddyPress (untested)
- CiviCRM hooks usable from WP plugins, WP Admin Utilities
- Shortcodes for profiles, petition, events, user dashboard
- Basic Gravity Forms integration plugin (CiviVIP)
- Contact Forms 7 -> remote Drupal installation (CiviCooP)
- Woonreferendum forms: Gravity + custom handler plugin
In conclusion
- Non-profits and political parties really do need nerds
and a digital campaign strategy to change the world
(and nerds should want to change the world)
- Wordpress + CiviCRM is a viable option for many (smaller) organisations, especially if they already use Wordpress
- Extensions like CiviCampaign and CiviVolunteer provide useful functionality that many organisations aren't yet aware of
- Possible future developments (would need client funding): improving (Gravity) forms integration for Wordpress, making CiviCampaign more useful in non-US contexts, etc, etc...
"Web servers have only interpreted code, in various ways... the point, however, is to change the world."
CiviCon North-West Europe 2016
Kevin Levie | 26-05-2016
KevinLevie
kevin@levity.nl
Using CiviCRM to change the world... one city at a time
By Kevin Levie
Using CiviCRM to change the world... one city at a time
Presentation at CiviCon North-West Europe 2016 (https://nweurope2016.civicrm.org)
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