Managing Community (Open Source and Higher Ed) through CiviCRM, an Open Source CRM

  • Date: November 12, 2025
  • Time: 11:00 AM America/New_York
  • Speaker:

    Deb Bryant, Interim Executive Director of Open Source Initiative. OSI is the steward of the Open Source Definition, and is actively involved in Open Source community-building, education, and public advocacy to promote awareness and the importance of non-proprietary software. Deb Byant has two decades of management in Open Source organizations – leading enterprise IT policy in state government as an early adopter of open standards and open source; helping build one of the world’s pioneering Open Source labs at Oregon State University; conducting and publishing research and consulting to international government as a trusted advisor on adoption of open source, and leading one of the world’s largest and most influential OSPOs at Red Hat for eight years. https://opensource.org/ 

    Deb Nicholson, Executive Director of Python Software Foundation. The Python Software Foundation (PSF) promotes, protects, and advances the Python programming language, and supports and facilitates the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers. Deb Nicholson is an experienced non-profit professional and passionate open source community builder who has worked at the Open Source Initiative, Software Freedom Conservancy, and the Open Invention Network. https://www.python.org 

    Jamie Tillman, CEO and Co-Founder of Prolydian. Prolydian provides full-service systems to credentialing and certification programs and organizations. Features of their offering include application processing, credential/certification tracking, integrated accounting, notifications, and remote proctoring. https://www.prolydian.com/ 

    Moderator: Joe Murray, PhD, is President of JMA Consulting, a leading provider of CiviCRM services with staff in five countries. Joe has served on ten non-profit boards, taught at McMaster University, co-authored Using CiviCRM (574pp), co-moderates https://civicrm.stackexchange.com, and is elected to the CiviCRM Community Council that helps govern the CiviCRM open source ecosystem.  https://jmaconsulting.biz/ 
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Higher Ed can use CRMs to provide a single consolidated view of all the types of contacts they serve: students, alumni, parents, donors, as well as staff, wanting to streamline workflows. CiviCRM is an open source CRM used by over 11,000 nonprofits like the Internet Archive and the New York State Senate. Its core functionality and hundreds of integrations and extensions position it well to support HigherEd.

  • OSI uses CiviCRM for fundraising, memberships, including for elections, and communications.
  • PSF uses CiviCRM to administer grant applications and for fundraising and communications.
  • Prolydian uses CiviCRM in their Credential and Certification system offering. 

This session will be a conversation about CiviCRM’s capabilities for HigherEd functions like student recruitment, including communications and campus visit registrations, decisions on scholarships, bursaries, and admissions, advancement and alumni relations, lifelong learning, student information systems, and student engagement.

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