India has over 3.3 million registered non-profits (one for every 400 people!), many of which are growing and looking for better solutions to manage their fundraising efforts. There is an immense and exciting opportunity at hand.
My team works closely with several non-profits that use CiviCRM in India, of which some have an international presence. Over the last six months we have had the opportunity to introduce CiviCRM to many other non-profits, who were very impressed by the wide range of functionalities already built into this affordable CRM.
However, there are a couple of features, not yet present in CiviCRM, which would make it much more useful to fund raisers in India. I am sharing one of those requests here, for your feedback and suggestions. In particular I would very much like to know if this issue is also requested by users in other countries.
The Context
Competition with peers: Many non-profits motivate their fundraisers to meet their fundraising targets by linking their performance reviews or bonuses to the amount that they raise. Thus fundraising is both collaborative (where the team must meet an overall target) and competitive (where each team member works to meet her/his own individual deliverable). In such a situation, fundraisers are very protective about their own leads and may not wish to share them with peers early in the fundraising process. They do not mind if their manager has access to these contacts, as long as there is no threat of a peer 'poaching' a lead.
Sense of control over one's own data: Non-profits constantly add new contacts to their database, segregated into restricted and non-restricted lists. We implement ACLs for them as and when requested. However, they would rather be able to set the level of access by themselves while adding their contact or creating their group.
The Question
Both the situations described above are recurring in nature, across organizations. Is there a way that the end user (typically a non-techie) could decide whether they wish to keep a particular contact or group private, share it with a specific user group (say all fundraisers in their office), or make it public for anyone who has access to the organization's database?