RedHen

I just got back from a fabulous weekend at BADCamp where we had the chance to discuss RedHen CRM at the nonprofit and product summits. These videos were generously filmed by Nicholas Roberts. The first is an in-depth discussion of RedHen CRM, covering why we built a native Drupal CRM in the first place, the technology that makes it possible, and applicable business cases. The second is cage match, err, make that panel ;), pitting RedHen against Trellon's CRM Core, Jackson River's Springboard, and CiviCRM. It was an honor and a pleasure to compare and contrast RedHen with those other amazing CRM offerings. RedHen CRM is already in use in over 200 projects, including our own Mission Investors Exchange and will soon launch as a core component of a private distribution for the Forum of Regional Association of Grant Makers.

RedHen CRM is one of many great stories featured in the Linux Journal's recent Drupal special addition. RedHen just laid a beta3 release and the ThinkShout team will be at the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit if anyone wants to connect.

This is the 5th in a series of articles exploring RedHen, ThinkShout's native Drupal 7 CRM platform. ThinkShout initially designed RedHen CRM around the complex association management (AMS) needs of nonprofits and trade associations. These association management requirements go well beyond the standard needs of most CRM/CMS solutions. However, in building an abstract tool with these needs at the forefront, our goal has been to future proof RedHen CRM as much as possible to ensure that its architecture can accommodate a wide variety of use cases.

RedHen CRM is similar to Drupal Commerce in its modular structure. As with Drupal Commerce, the core RedHen modules that can be downloaded on the Drupal.org project page won't provide you with a working CRM right out of the box. RedHen is intended to provide developers and site builders with the building blocks for quickly creating their own CRM data models that map to their particular business requirements and workflow. Consequently, setting up a new RedHen CRM instance does require configuration.

In the future, ThinkShout is likely to release RedHen "Features" or "Apps" that provide prepackaged CRM solutions for different use cases. At the time of the publication of this article, we know of more than 70 RedHen CRM solutions built by other Drupal developers and site builders.

In addition to its association management uses, we see RedHen CRM as an ideal starting point for building custom sales pipeline management tools and project management applications, as well as Drupal integration points with 3rd-party ERP (enterprise resource planning) tools and financial accounting packages.