I just wanted to first introduce ourselves: http://www.tps.coop/ is a draft website currently a crude copy paste of one of our funding documents and we are talking to coop-uk and @Sion about making it into a Community Benefit society. I am just one of the members so hopefully I will define our need correctly!
The TL;DR as to what we are is: we potentially have a large network across several boroughs of South West London (upwards from 10k) with the current beach head located in Kingston Upon Thames (Canbury Works). This beach head will be specialized in hardware producing companies/freelancers given our links with (CRE-8 make + test. But we hope to in future create more beach heads with different speciality expanding network. The main commitment of this CBS is to help create more employment (self or otherwise) and/or have more support when growing. All benefits, as per CBS requirements, are reinvested to the community and society.
We feel that we need a CRM. We have gone through several CRM solutions (zohoCRM, Salesforce, nationbuilder, …) and I have to say that I keep falling back to civiCRM. I have seen the back end of it, and I think I can eventually get to install it and run it but we would like things like Mosaic, tie it up to some sort of mailing distributor such as Spark? to avoid spam, decent specs server to be able to run civiCRM, etc. This is not our day job so we got as far as setting up a domain and I set up a gitLab webpage.
So we would like a partner up with someone or some company to get it up and running. We understand that there are costs. We would go step by set, membership management, then mailing list, tracking volunteers, and so forth. I would have thought this would be a one off job to set it up that will have some costs which we will be prepared to pay but we would like to not have vendor lock-in and be set up in a way that we can show others how to use it.
We also thought about distributed networks such as mastodon for posting, discourse forum and mattermost for more instant communication but I think that will have to wait until we got CRM working: we still don’t know what our members need.
Hi @amunizp
I provide CiviCRM set up and support as part of http://mc3.coop (a CoTech member), generally using hosting provided by Webarchitects (also a member). I’d be very happy to have a conversation with you about what you need and how I could help out. You can reach me at graham@mc3.coop and we could set up a call.
Mr understanding was that most modern CBS rules have an option to be charitable if all objects are charitable. Most CLTs are charitable CBSs.
In fact, given the “exempt charity” charitable status of CBSs is given by HMRC I’m not even sure you need to have specific rules to enable it. If all your objects are charitable (and I’d guess if you also choose to have a statutory asset lock) then you should be ok I think. I’ll check with all the experts on the Community Shares practitioners Google Group…
