Benefits & features
Our hosted offering is in active development and will not be complete until at least Q3 2006 but is already servicable and in active use by over 2,000 organizations. To find out if CivicSpace is ready for you here is list of the current functionality and the status of its development.
Currently available
Read this table to see a complete list of applications and features with links to handbook pages.
Website management
- CivicSpace is built on Drupal, a flexible and powerful "best of breed" CMS capable of running all kinds of websites. It comes with a WYSIWIG editor and it is simple to learn how to update and submit content on your site. A selection of sample themes are included with CivicSpace and the theming system gives you complete control over the appearance and layout of your website.
Community Tools
- Blogging – All the features you would expect in a top tier blogging tool (WYSIWYG editor, trackback, image and file upload, syndication) plus peer moderation and peer publishing tools. You can give every user on your CivicSpace site the ability to post and manage an individual blog.
- Forums – Create as many discussion forums as you want. You can even enable your forum to accept and send email messages just like a yahoo group.
- File storage – Attach files to any post as easily as attaching files to emails.
- Photo Galleries – Create and maintain as many photo galleries as you want. You can even give users access to mantain their own personal galleries and comment on any picture.
- Polls and Surveys – You can easily create polls and surveys to collect information from your users and reach consensus.
- Social Networking – Users can search for other users with similiar profiles, add them as buddy list, and track their participation on the site.
Organizing
- Contact Management with CiviCRM – Currently you can dynamically create a user registration form to collect all manner of constituent information. You can import contact data from CSV files, search your database of contacts, and set permissions to access them. A much more powerful and easier to use Community Relationship Management system (CiviCRM) is currently in development and has replaced current Contact Management in December 2005. It will have a much more powerful data model that will make it possible to use CivicSpace as your main donor and volunteer database and will feature simple but powerful searching, permission, data importing / exporting, and reporting tools. More information on the project is can be found "here".
- Mass Mailing – Our current solution allows you to create multiple mailinglists, manage subscribers, and send thousands of emails at a time. Our improved version is based on functionality in PHPList will support bounce tracking, open rates, tokens, and HTML templates.
- CiviContribute - an advanced donation system under development by the CiviCRM team.
- Events - The event system allows users to submit and mantain event listings on your site. You can send and track invitations to events and find and manage volunteers.
Under heavy development
- An Organic Group based service to allow spontaneous organizing with mailing list integration, and social networking tools. This will be available as a loosely packaged release and available for contract development.
Future development...
- A hosted version of CivicSpace is being developed.
