Colorado School Choice goes live at Ed News!

CiviCore is proud to announce that the Colorado School Choice data system is now powering the new Education News Colorado data center.  You can find the application at http://csc.ednewsparent.org.

The Colorado School Choice data system contains detailed information on all 1700 schools in Colorado.  The system provides parents with better ways to understand schools in their area and make informed school choices for their children by providing them information on enrollment statistics, achievement and performance, and programs offered.  The interactive maps and charts provide parents with great tools for better understanding the schools in their area.

Education News Colorado, found at http://ednewscolorado.org, is the only news service devoted to continuing, in-depth coverage of education policymaking in the legislature and state government.  It features comprehensive coverage and serious analysis of such issues as school choice, accountability, and education reform.  They recently launched a partner site, "EdNews Parent," found at http://ednewsparent.org, as a "way to engage Colorado parents on issues we all care about: teaching and learning, healthy schools, and school safety."  Here at CiviCore, we're excited to help Colorado parents make more informed decisions around school choice by equipping this new website with the Colorado School Choice data system.

Interview with Ric Merrifield – How do you define your work? (Part 3 of 3)

Note:  This is part 3 of CiviCore Principal Charles Naumer's interview with Ric Merrifield.  See Part 1 and Part 2 for more information on this interview.  For more on Ric Merrifield’s work, http://www.rethinkbook.com

Ric has developed a very interesting way to visualize and understand the work of organizations using heat maps.  His heat map approach helps organizations to diagram their processes and to identify the processes according to how they are performing and the value to the organization’s mission.  The following is an example of one of Ric’s heat maps.

My conversation with Ric challenged me to reconsider the how’s, what’s and why’s of our business.  As may be typical of a mission driven organization, when considering these aspects it always comes back to the why’s and what’s we believe rather than the specifics of how and what we do.  CiviCore was founded based on the belief that we could make a significant social impact by providing social sector organizations with powerful and cost effective software delivered via the Internet.  These are the beliefs that drive our organization and in turn determine what we consider of value.  This focus seems to be very well suited to Ric’s heat mapping approach that focus on value and performance.

Ric’s work has offered some interesting insight into our work as well as our own.  The more I have considered Ric’s work the more it seems like a natural fit to social sector, mission driven organizations.

Interview with Ric Merrifield – Who is our ideal customer? (Part 2 of 3)

Note:  This is part 2 of CiviCore Principal Charles Naumer's interview with Ric Merrifield.  See Part 1 for more information on this interview.  For more on Ric Merrifield’s work, http://www.rethinkbook.com

One of the questions that Ric posed to me during our chat was “Who is your ideal customer?”  This is a question that we have thought about a lot.  So, it didn’t take me by surprise but always causes me to re-evaluate our beliefs as a company.  In the context of my conversation with Ric, and his focus on core business processes, the question caused me to evaluate our answer against the premises of his work.  Ric’s approach fits a mission driven organization, such as CiviCore, very well. My initial reaction to this question is to think about the clients that we have created the most value for and to try and identify the commonalities across those client relationships.  Additionally, as a social mission driven organization, we like to ask the question “where do we feel we make the greatest social impact?”

In the context of Ric’s work, we believe that the types of organizations we create the most value for are organizations that have a clear view of their unique value proposition.  Once we understand our client’s value proposition we are able to customize our software to help our clients become more efficient and effective.  This customization process allows our clients to continue to be innovative in the way they serve their clientele and provides a path forward allowing software to adapt to the evolution of their organization.

We believe that the value proposition that Ric discusses doesn’t only apply to individual organizations, it may also apply to networks of organizations.  An area CiviCore has been able to create great value is by working with multi-affiliate groups.  CiviCore works with multi-affiliate groups to understand core processes across their network and identifies common functionality shared by all affiliated organizations.  Shared work processes and data elements are also identified to support the network’s activities. In this way, CiviCore works with networks of organizations to provide them with software customized to their unique needs and provides a way for costs to be shared among affiliate organizations.

Our experience has been that by customizing our application platform to provide our clients with solutions that fit their specific needs our clients are better able to achieve their mission and grow as an organization.  It is very gratifying for us to hear from our customers once we have finished customizing an application that it is “exactly what they need” and for them to say “you get us – you get what we are trying to do”.  These are the types of comments that really make us feel as if we are on the right track and that we are helping our clients to make a difference.

CiviCore Launches software for ELK (Environmental Learning for Kids)

CiviCore is proud to announce the recent launch of our youth services platform for Environmental Learning for Kids. ELK is a Denver-based, 501(c)3 organization established in 1996 by two wildlife biologists, Scott and Stacie Gilmore, who saw a growing need to introduce and educate Colorado's urban youth about science, math, leadership and careers. ELK focuses on experiential youth development and to date has taken more than 95,000 youth into the outdoors.

Here is what Cindy Chang, ELK's Resource Development Associate Director, had to say about her experience working with CiviCore:

“Before Civicore, we were using a database that was built for sales, not for non-profits. This meant we had to jury-rig a lot of the tools for our own use, which oftentimes failed us. Eventually, we gave up and stopped using it regularly, which meant our data quickly went out of date.

With Civicore, we had a database that was built for us, which meant it worked right away, the right way. The staff at Civicore were easy to work with. Their experience with so many non-profits was clear when they were talking with us about our programs and about our needs. This made the development process surprisingly smooth, calm, and pain-free! Now, after the development process, Civicore staff are responsive to our needs and requests within one working day. I am extremely impressed with their service, their skills, and their ability to communicate with us laypeople.

In my experience with many databases, I can easily say that Civicore’s makes the most sense to enter, find, and report data, and to teach others how to use. It just makes sense. And they’re improving it everyday. We benefit from these improvements immediately and with absolutely no hassle or interruption on our end. I would definitely recommend Civicore to anyone in the non-profit sector who just wants a working database.”

We'd like to thank ELK both for choosing to partner with CiviCore as well as for the great things they do for the youth of Denver. We hope that our software will help their organization continue to grow and exceed!

Interview with Ric Merrifield – A Focus on Core Processes (Part 1 of 3)

Recently, CiviCore Partner Charles Naumer had an opportunity to sit down and talk with business analyst and author Ric Merrifield. Ric is Microsoft's official "Business Architect," focusing on helping companies to rethink their operating models and get out of the “how” trap. In his latest book Re-Think, he challenges readers to think about “what” we’re doing and “why” we’re doing it. He suggests that we need to move beyond focusing on how we do things to think about what activities are critical to success. In addition to his work at Microsoft, Ric is engaged and interested in the social sector. Below is part one of a three-part series covering their conversation.


"Ric and I discussed some of his experiences with nonprofit organizations and ways in which his business process work is applicable to social sector organization. Ric has done a lot of work to better understand the role of technology within organizations. One area that is particularly interesting to CiviCore is his view on ways that social sector organizations can capitalize on technological innovation. He encourages organizations to identify which of their processes are unique to their organization and which are similar to other organizations. Once an organization identifies what they do differently they can begin to focus on where they add the most value as an organization. For example, if an organization does accounting like everyone else then this isn’t a key value added aspect of their organization. For these areas, they should move to adopt the same accounting software and products used by others. They should take advantage of low-cost, mass marketed “off-the-shelf” solutions or even open-source solutions designed for that specific function.


Once an organization identifies the value producing aspects of their organization they should dedicate resources to further developing systems and processes to support these aspects of their organization. For example, if an organization has a specialized method of delivering services to their clients, they should focus on developing systems to support their organization in delivering these services. They should continue to evolve, develop, and improve this aspect of their business and the systems that support it. In doing so, they should choose technology that will grow and can be adapted to their processes.


For us at CiviCore, this message has been refreshing and right on target. We work very hard to understand and tailor our software to specific focus organizational types such as volunteer organizations, mentoring programs, youth centered organizations, and many others. We then work hard to understand each organization’s individual requirements and further customize our software to meet each organization’s needs. In this way, our clients not only benefit from the work already done to understand their service area but also benefit from software tailored to meet their specific needs. In a nutshell, this is the CiviCore value proposition that we continue to develop in order to best serve our customers and to follow our mission of making the largest possible impact in the social sector."

Note:  For more on Ric Merrifield’s work visit – http://www.rethinkbook.com.  Stay tuned next week for part 2 of this interview.