That could be a good mission to offer to a person with technical abilities who would like to volunteer for Maison des Lanceurs d’Alerte 
The timing is likely to be good if we can start something like this when we go back to work in September. Later could be good aswell.
I’m not sure the services proposed by HelloAsso are sufficient : for instance do they enable reminders for membership renewal ?
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In the past months we had many internal discussions about CiviCRM and they were inconclusive. The incentive for an organization already using HelloAsso is independence but the maintenance cost and the learning curve are perceived as too high.
Assuming someone technical is willing to learn CiviCRM and has no prior knowledge, it is estimated at approximately 4 weeks full time over a period of six months before they are able to resolve all problems and make the right choices. The migration time to switch from HelloAsso to CiviCRM is estimated at two weeks full time over a period of two months if done properly by someone with prior CiviCRM knowledge.
The maintenance cost is likely to be two days a year (including answering internal support requests, downtime, updating the payment system interface) and around 10€/month in server hosting. It is estimated that HelloAsso costs around 100€/month to the MLA. This is based on the analysis all receipts between November 2018 and March 2020 and is made difficult because HelloAsso does not provide an easy access to this information.
Is it literally the cost or a some-kind-of-profit HelloAsso makes with MLA activities (with donations that are made at the same time as those to the MLA for instance) ?
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It is donations that are piggybacked by HelloAsso when the MLA campaigns. If MLA does not campaign, there is no money going to HelloAsso. The MLA also promotes HelloAsso to every person making a donation: this is a hidden cost for which the MLA is not compensated and that benefits HelloAsso.
It is easier to calculate these costs than in the case of Facebook and Google but it eventually is the same logic. HelloAsso does not provide a service for free. They provide a service and are paid in marketing and donations.
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The main advantage of HelloAsso is that it is a payment solution.
It is not to be used for CRM actually.
I’m not sure HelloAsso has to be “replaced” by a CRM solution such as CiviCRM, except if this CRM solution offers a payment solution aswell or if the MLA gets another payment solution (which may be a good option).
At this point, I assume HelloAsso needs more to be complemented by a CRM solution but I also assume that this supposes to work on the interactions between payment and CRM solutions…
CiviCRM is able to do all that HelloAsso does. I think it is a viable alternative to HelloAsso. I would even go as far as to say it’s the only alternative.
It is able to provide a payment solution ??! That is a great news !
It is a software, not an organization, so it would be more accurate to say that it supports multiple payment solutions. When a non-profit uses CiviCRM they:
- Install the CiviCRM software
- Subscribe to a payment provider supported by CiviCRM
- Enter the credentials of the payment provider into CiviCRM
This is, for instance, what the FSF does. In my opinion CiviCRM is not a great CRM: it lacks too many features. But it is mostly used to manage membership subscriptions, renewal, donations campaigns and can be relied on for this purpose.
This is the conclusion of my observations but I did not actually run a CiviCRM myself, except for testing. I’m however confident it can replace HelloAsso without causing usability problems. Which does not mean it can be done overnight, primarily because:
- One has to migrate the user base from HelloAsso to CiviCRM and there is zero support for that so it will need to be done manually or with home grown scripts
- One has to refrain from assuming CiviCRM will provide anything more than HelloAsso, despite the CRM in it’s name (i.e. no contact database management, no event planning feature, etc.)
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Alright !
That is close to what I imagined indeed.