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Please join me in congratulating the new CiviCRM Community Council. The council has 11 seats. Nine candidates each received endorsements from two community members. There were fewer candidates than seats, so all nine are elected by acclamation.

We've been tracking various metrics each month for over a year now in lieu of producing a big annual report. The latest, for October, is now live at https://civicrm.com/about

At this point, we have a number of trends that we can confidently point to (because the methodology of collecting them has been consistent), even if the numbers behind them are debatable (speaking of the stats, for example).

There has been a security release for CiviCRM. Upgrades are available for:

Working with CiviCRM every day at the Wikimedia Foundation has given me a real appreciation for the people behind the system. As a user, I know how much we rely on Civi to support our work and how important it is to have people we can turn to when we need help!

The CiviCRM developer training took place at the CiviCRM Paris conference.

I had been programming a CiviCRM extension for a few weeks, as a learning project. It's a simple search engine extension. I learned on my own, solved my issues as they occurred. I followed the developer and user guides. I made good progress, but I could still benefit from a proper training by experts.

Thanks to the hard work of CiviCRM’s incredible community of contributors, CiviCRM version 6.19.0 is now ready to download. This is a regular monthly release that includes new features and bug fixes. Details are available in the monthly release notes.

Your are encouraged to upgrade now for the most stable, secure CiviCRM experience:

CiviCRM keeps growing. New installs land every month, and the product gets stronger with each release. The Community Council election has started, and the community wants strong candidates to help guide what comes next.

Nominations are open now. Declare your candidacy by October 21, 2026.

Based on some of the questions from our customers we at CiviCooP have developed an extension to enable event sessions for events. With this extension you can manage simultaneous sessions within an event and register participants for each session.

Want to know more about serving on the CiviCRM Community Council? Come to a one hour meeting October 8 with some current members. We'll do a short presentation, talk about what have been the pros and cons of serving, and open up for questions.

For more info, see https://civicrm.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=1805 . Register to get the Zoom meeting link.

Have you ever wanted to be more involved in how CiviCRM makes decisions? The Community Council election starts soon.

Thanks to the hard work of CiviCRM’s incredible community of contributors, CiviCRM version 6.18.0 is now ready to download. This is a regular monthly release that includes new features and bug fixes. Details are available in the monthly release notes.

Your are encouraged to upgrade now for the most stable, secure CiviCRM experience:

Download CiviCRM

In late July 2026, Beacon CRM — a cloud fundraising platform used by more than 1,500 UK charities — discovered that someone had used compromised credentials to access copies of its customer database backups.

In June 2026, users from around the UK met for CiviBRM, a user focussed event in Birmingham.

The programme was deliberately expansive, reflecting the many different ways people use CiviCRM. We heard from organisations running advice services, campaigning and fundraising, managing events, supporting volunteers and building community savings clubs.

There has been a security release for CiviCRM. Upgrades are available for:

At our next CiviCRM Scotland Meetup, Aidan Saunders, Director at Squiffle Consulting, will introduce the essentials of managing duplicate Contacts in CiviCRM. Learn how to use Dedupe Rules and Contact Merging to identify, review and clean up duplicate records, helping you maintain a more accurate and reliable CiviCRM Contact database.

Almost every question I get asked about Cases and Grants turns out to be a question about time. Which of these have been open longest? What's overlapping? What's due next, and how much of it lands in the same month?

Recently I had the chance to attend CiviCamp Toronto, and I was reminded of the power of getting our community together in person. This inspired me to pitch in and try to reboot the CiviDay NYC events that we used to organize here in New York.

I will need your help!

Semper IT and Blackfly Solutions are scaling back involvement in the CiviCRM iATS Payments Extension

If you've opened up CiviCRM and think, “Where do I go to find that?” you are not alone.

In recent user feedback, people told us:

The interface is dated compared to other CRM products.

CiviCRM Extended Security Release (ESR) has slowly grown in popularity as a very stable version of CiviCRM that isn’t too far removed from many of the great features that have shown up in the latest stable version, namely SearchKit, FormBuilder, and the River framework.

For organizations that want to avoid the monthly upgrade process, CiviCRM ESR is a good potential option.