Accessibility Tools

Skip to main content

About CiviCRM

CiviCRM is an open source project with the mission to ensure that nonprofit and civic sector organizations around the world have access to a world-class CRM that they are free to download, modify and use regardless of their budget, mission or operational focus.

CiviCRM is powered by an amazing community of contributors and supporters, and is built and maintained by a Core Team of 7 individuals. It is independent and self-funded. 

The legal entity behind CiviCRM is CiviCRM LLC, a California-based limited liability company.

This is version 2 of our monthly report demonstrating CiviCRM’s ongoing performance. We’re using this to replace the annual report format. Archives of past reports can be found here. We will update this report on the first of each month we relevant metrics and commentary. Last modified: 10 April, 2026
Jump into the details below

The Scorecard

Health Score

Just “ok”
9.09% from previous month
This report contains a lot of information. If you’re short on time, use this health scorecard to get an idea of where we’re at.

Key Report Takeaways

  • We are experiencing tremendous ecosystem growth; so much so that we think something is up with the stats! Still, we’re seeing growth in site stats, downloads, user registration, site registrations, Spark and Academy subscriptions… basically, we’re seeing growth everywhere.
  • We’ve seen some recovery in the overall health score, despite the fact that we’re still running a loss of $48,012 for the past 12 rolling months. That’s down 11.38% (in a good way from the previous month) but it’s still a running loss.
  • With > 42% of our income coming from the Core Team, we are still too reliant on earned income and need community funding and/or subscription income to grow. Too much earned income risks shifting our priorities to “paid priorities” that certainly improve the product, but may delay our own priorities that tend do be more foundational in nature is currently delaying our own priorities, specifically: remote forms, Oauth work, FormBuilder payments, accessibility improvements and version 2 of the River framework.
  • Our cash burn rate is still running in the red, so as our vast cash horde dwindles, we will shift away from product development and focus instead on maintaining what we have, both from a technical and financial standpoint. Basically, this risks product stagnation.
By no means is this health score perfect nor does it account for every possible metric in the CiviCRM ecosystem. It reconciles a few metrics that are representative of the project and its capacity as a whole, specifically:
  • Ecosystem Growth
    A growing ecosystem means increased potential support and capacity.
  • Source of Income
    The more community funding, the more flexible we are to make foundational improvements in the product.
  • Financial Runway
    Our capacity to sustain the project based on current trends.
All metrics assessed use a rolling 12 month comparison in order to establish recent trends.
The result? The closer this health score is to 100, the more we can focus on product development without worrying about sustaining the project. The closer to 0, the less we focus on product development and the more we are required to focus on sustaining the project.
Jump to full report

The Ecosystem

CiviCRM Installations

0

This metric represents the total number of voluntary, anonymous installation pingbacks to us. It may include development or test sites, though we do our best to filter those. It does not include installations that have disabled the pingback.

Some trends

  • 30.07% vs. previous month
  • 40.47% vs. previous 3 months
  • 70.64% vs. previous year

More statistics are available to supporters at https://civicrm.org/core-stats

And growing!

By nearly all metrics, CiviCRM is growing… so much so that, as we said, we’re investigating if there is an issue with the stats! The total number of known installations made a big jump from the previous month, though it’s supported by strong growth in other areas such as website stats (traffic to civicrm.org and civicrm.com is up 45.75% vs. previous month), Spark and Academy subscriptions, user and site registrations, and overall downloads.

The CiviCRM ecosystem includes organizations, service providers, independent developers and nonprofit consultants, and individual users, all located around the world and bringing different skills and experiences to the community.

As an open source project, CiviCRM is sustained by both financial supporters and active contributors.

Partners

0

No growth since previous month

CiviCRM Partners are the experts at implementing, customizing and supporting CiviCRM. They generously fund and sustain the project.

View Partners

Contributors

0

2.22% vs. previous month

Contributors support CiviCRM through code contributions, including new features and bug fixes. They are critical for CiviCRM’s development.

View Contributors

Members

0

4.62% vs. previous month

Members are end user organizations and individuals that voluntarily fund and help sustain CiviCRM on an ongoing basis. Members rock!

Support Us

Spark Growth

0

Year over year growth in the number of CiviCRM Spark subscriptions.

Some trends

  • 4.21% vs. previous month
  • 0.51% vs. previous 3 months

CiviCRM Spark is a lightweight, SaaS product produced and maintained by the CiviCRM Core Team. It’s intended to be a fast, easy and inexpensive option for organizations that are new to CiviCRM or new to CRM’s, in general.

We’re continuing to focus on scaling Spark as we believe it represents a powerful onboarding channel for the ecosystem. We’re getting bogged down on support requests and are making a foundational change by shifting to CiviCRM Standalone.

While growth has slowed down a bit, Spark is still growing. Furthermore, it’s benefitting from support for various partners that have opted to sponsor Spark and help it grow:

Some Achievements

Improved audience engagement

We pushed a lot of things forward on the marketing and engagement front, but there is still lots to be done. You can follow the marketing group on Gitlab.

Things we’re proud of…

  • We’re grown our offsite presence on Mastodon, Blue Sky and LinkedIn, and have recently added support for Spanish, German, Polish and Ukranian. Look for more multilingual communications and more native translations for CiviAcademy videos.
  • The Ambassador Program continues to grow and recently added support for French.

Sustained River Lea theme development

We’re leaving this one up here not because we’re lazy, but rather because “UX improvements” has historically been the #1 requested ‘feature’. If you, as users or providers of CiviCRM really want this, then it’s time to put your money where your mouth is! We are running a $48k loss and will not invest directly in River until we close that gap. The best way to help is to become a member.

Developed and launched toward the end of 2024, River Lea has become not only the default theme framework, it’s also the most popular!

River Lea is a major first step towards broad improvement to the overall user experience in CiviCRM, which is critical to new user adoption and user retention. Focus in 2025 was on general stability.

There is still work to be done…

  • Budget for River Lea for 2026 has been suspended. Sorry, but we need to reduce our costs a bit. In order to continue with feature development, the community has to step up via either a targeted Make it Happen campaign or paid issue queue work. Please contact us if you are interested.
  • There are big potential features for River Lea that we’d love to see get added, including an in-app customizer, better frontend themeing, and accessibility compliance. There is so much potential! River Lea delivers on a roadmap promise to improve the UI, but there’s still work to do!
To Top

The Numbers

Budget shortfall

0

For the past 12 months, up to 31/03/2026.
11.38% from previous month

This is Our Challenge

The sustainability of CiviCRM, as a project, is based on an under-funded Core Team. Despite amazing community support, we have historically bootstrapped our way to sustainability.

Unfortunately, this approach leads to inconsistent development efforts, unnecessary pauses, sporadic surges in new features, etc., all of which causes unnecessary inefficiencies.

If this concerns you, please learn more about how to help or jump right in and…

Support Us!

Our Financials

April 1, 2026: Core Team pay increase

We took a 5% pay raise effective April 1, 2026 to offset the increased cost of living and reverse the 3.83% pay cut we were experiencing as a result. This means that our budget will feel increasing pressure, sooner.

CiviCRM is sustained by the support of its generous community along with the work of the CiviCRM Core Team. We do not receive investment funding from venture capitalists. Our ‘shareholders’ are our community.

We attempt to run a sustainable project by balancing the cost to maintain the software along with implementing new developments. A focus on the latter tends to result in budget shortfalls, like what we are currently experiencing. A focus on the form tends to result in product stagnation. 

Let’s get a little more granular

We use the charts below to group income and expenses into major categories. A more detailed Profit and Loss statement can be found in the extras below.

Some notes about our Monthly Income by Source…

  • Core Team income (earned income and subscriptions) has risen to 42.86% of budget. This is a mixed blessing. Yes, it funds us. But it tends to shift our priorities to those that are paying for our work.
  • Regarding the RevShare: The % shared back to CiviCRM LLC does not increase otherwise effective the rates charged by the processors to end user organizations. CiviCRM LLC does not enter into contracts that adversely affect payment processing rates for end users.
  • We’re starting to see more member signups, which is great! Income for the rolling 12 months is up 41.07% at the end of March compared to that at the end of February. This is very positive, though members still only account for 2.33% of our budget.
  • Partner dues have also increased for the same period (end of March vs. End of February for the past 12 months, rolling) by 3.17% and currently accounts for 26.42% of our budget.
  • Spark income is up for the same period by 4.14%, accounting for 8.74% of Core Team budget.

Some notes about our Monthly Expenses by Source…

  • We don’t much care for this expense breakdown because it doesn’t offer much value. We’re currently working on an alternative approach to demonstrating how funds are used within the project.
  • Labor took a bit of dive in February as the result of some staff leave. Though we have cut back on contract labor, we do expect labor costs to rise throughout the year.
  • We’re supporting several events at the moment, which is not something we love to do. We expect to see a rise in event related expenses very soon.
  • Core Team labor represents 76.98% of the budget, which is about what we’ve historically averaged. We expect this metric to climb as we add on some additional staff capacity.

How we can fix this budget shortfall, together

We believe strongly in the power of community. More than anything, it is what drives this amazing open source project. As we stated at the top of this page, CiviCRM is completely independent and self-funded. And we aim to keep it that way. But we cannot do it without the CiviCRM community!

Grow the ecosystem

Perhaps the most important thing we can do is grow the ecosystem. Both our RevShare and Subscriptions income scale with the size of our userbase. This is a longer term strategy and is in progress, led by the efforts of the CiviCRM Marketing Team in conjunction with the Core Team.

How you can help

  • Register your organization on civicrm.org and share some details about your organization. This helps us understand who is using the software and how.
  • Support our offsite promotion on Mastodon, Blue Sky and LinkedIn to help us raise brand awareness.
  • Share a review of CiviCRM, good or bad, and how it’s worked for your organization. Send us an email to info@civicrm.org and we’ll publish it on civicrm.com.
  • Recommend CiviCRM to peer organizations that may benefit. Encourage them to attend an event or local meetup to learn more.

Grow member support

While we have seen growth in the CiviCRM partner program, member support from end user organizations is painfully low. In fact, only 0.15% of end users support CiviCRM as members.
If just 1% of end user organizations joined as members, at the lowest level, it would eliminate our current shortfall. Please, join us and help sustain CiviCRM for everyone.

You can support as an individual member as well

We recently rebooted our individual giving program and have seen wonderful success. We call is the Coffee Club.
Buy Us a Coffee

Host more local events

CiviCRM benefits from events in two primary ways: 1) they can generate funds for the Core Team and 2) they can help raise brand awareness.

Events can range in size from informal meetups to larger CiviCamps that often include trainings and sprints. Events are not limited to in-person, though. They can be online trainings and general webinars as well.

View upcoming events
Contact us to host an event
And don’t forget to mark your calendars for Paris 2026 CiviConf & CiviSprint (5-9 october 2026).

Pursue grants

Grants represent a potential opportunity for CiviCRM, however they have historically been ‘hit or miss’… mostly the latter. We batted zero for three in 2025. 🙁

Where we have seen some success is in community driven grant applications whereby community members identify and pursue grants on behalf of CiviCRM.

Quite often these are for a specific feature or purpose, so some consideration around Core Team capacity and priorities needs to be taken into account. Still, this is where we’ve seen the most success with respect to grants.

Identified one that might be worth pursuing?

Get in touch with the Core Team
To Top

Environmental Impact

We continued to support the work of Ecologi throughout 2025 and remain committed to funding opportunities that have a meaningful impact on the environment and on global climate change.

3 Years of Climate Action

100 Tonnes of CO2e Avoided

100 Green Trees Planted

Join our efforts and support Ecologi today!
To Top