Kabissa is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization founded in 1999. Our mission is to help African civil society organizations to put Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to work for the benefit of their communities.
Kabissa's current priority is to support the networking, information sharing and ICT peer learning needs of African civic society organizations. This is done by maintaining an online platform at http://www.kabissa.org with a searchable organization directory, community blog and monthly member newsletter. Kabissa also runs a community forum and organizes webinars. Kabissa works closely with Erik Hommel, their in-house CiviCRM guru who contributes a few volunteer hours a month to Kabissa.
On May 20, 2014, Kabissa organized a roundtable that featured CiviCRM. During this roundtable, Tobias Eigen, Executive Director of Kabissa indicated the three things he likes most about CiviCRM:
1. Provides powerful functionality nonprofits like Kabissa need out of the box, letting us get a lot of our needs met without any programming or customizations. This includes: basic contact management tasks like import/export and categorization etc, as well as tracking activities related to one or groups of contacts, and surprisingly robust tools for donation management, sending out and tracking newsletters, organizing events, and more. It is nice as that it also integrates with Drupal, WordPress and Joomla.
2. It is extendable through plugins and custom code when we do need something new and we have a budget for it. We took advantage of this early; to create a searchable organization directory (e.g.http://kabissa.org/connect/latest and profile pages (e.g. http://civicus.kabissa.org) for our members all using custom code. (going forward we'd like to change this to use new core code that can cover our needs)
3. It is Open Source Software, so improvements made to the core code or plugins are contributed back for the benefit of all, and can be tested by others as well. And it has a great and welcoming community forum where most questions you might have are probably already being discussed!