Case Study: Građanske inicijative rapidly unites media and NGOs to mobilize support for press freedom with CiviCRM

Media Organizations and NGOs in Serbia Use CiviCRM to Organize Protest for Press Freedom

Građanske inicijative, a Belgrade‑based NGO leading the "For Press Freedom" (Za slobodu medija) campaign after the Vranjske newspaper shutdown, faced the challenge of unifying contact lists held across multiple organizations and platforms, training users with no CRM experience, and mobilizing supporters within just two days. To meet this urgent need they adopted CiviCRM (a localized instance hosted via Catalyst’s CiviCatalyst service).

Using CiviCRM, the team imported and deduplicated contacts, consolidated a single mailing list, created mailings with Mosaico, and tracked engagement (contacts, calendar, contributions, mailings, reports); Catalyst provided rapid deployment and user training. The quick CiviCRM implementation enabled broad outreach: more than 80 organizations signed the petition and hundreds of organizations and individuals have since supported the initiative, all organized and mobilized in the campaign’s short timeframe.

Građanske inicijative