Decide on CRM solution and hosting

Having a tool to manage contacts - touching people within the community - from fundraising through project onboarding feels quite essential as we develop new roadmaps and initiatives right now - lots of people love Giveth and have filled out forms or given us cards or asked how to get more engaged through the Riot chat forums. As we have a lot of new information to share, using a tool that tracks what people are most interested in and how they would like to be involved will help a lot with more targeted and personalized communications from new contributors coming in and put us in a proactive position for the transfer of knowledge and maintenance of relationships going forward.

There's a tool in the USD fundraising world that I love, made by my friend Roderick Campbell - https://commitchange.com/ It's an all in one software solution that hosts the campaigns, and also the contact management. In my dreams of the future of giving, the DApp would become something like this only with addresses (addrethes ;) ) for blockchain entities - drawing a line through their giving interests (DACs & DAOs) to their actual impacts (campaigns and milestones).

This is awesome; good lookin out, Dani. The knowledge of the community's interest is a resource we all hold, scattered collectively in all our brain-pockets and is so valuable it should def be cared for and tracked so connections are valued and utilized!

Is CiviCRM a better option for us? Which part of the above proposed implementation plan would it replace? Just the Suite part, and then the other 2 are the same? Is the only monetary implication the $300 payed to google? I'm curious b/c if part of what we pay for goes to Suite or CiviCRM, then I would want to consider that more heavily before making a decision (because it feels better to pay a company providing tools to non-profits than to reg sales biz). Because I have all these questions, i'm gonna "disagree" for now... just cuz i want more info and the proposal feels pretty final. I respect that y'all have done lots of research tho and if ya answer my questions I'll gladly support whatever decision you guys think is best!

I checked in with Vojtech who notes that while CiviCRM presents a more compelling product, the tech behind it is old and SuiteCRM is a more viable solution.

In this case I think choosing SuiteCRM right now and committing for a year is the best approach; in that time we will see if there's something else better and we can set up fields for data import/export now so that changing tools in the future is not too difficult.

Alternative is to invest more time in evaluating alternates and I think, this is good enough to try!

Hey @loie - I wanted to weigh in that SuiteCRM is essentially free for us to use, since we deploy a self-hosted version - it is also open source and they make their profits by offering hosting themselves as well as enhanced support. The 300 USD are purely the cost of paying google cloud. We could also setup everything ourselves, but the time cost would probably raise the total as also in this model we can't host for free.

I will wait another day and then start to implement this.

Yeah I think either of these is good enough to try now, IMHO the sooner we have something the better.