Perilla

Members

A member signs in from an emailed link and never sets a password

Members do not get an account. They get a link, good once and for fifteen minutes, sent to the address already on their record. Clicking it signs them in, and there is no password to set now or to lose a year later when the renewal notice arrives.

Membership data rots because correcting it costs the member a forgotten password and the coordinator an email thread. Take both away and people fix their own records.

Renew

One screen shows their term dates, their tier and what is owed, and the payment attaches to the same record.

Give

Cards go through Stripe, one-off or recurring. A cheque or a gift taken in person is recorded by a coordinator against the same contact.

Correct their own details

They can change their address, phone, email and contact preferences, and the change lands in the CRM rather than in somebody’s inbox.

Whatever else the organization runs

An organization can also switch on events, a member directory, volunteer signups or campaign actions. Each is turned on per organization rather than shipped to everybody.

Coordinators

Coordinators run the membership work without opening the CRM

Staff get a console over the same records: contacts, contributions, membership tiers, segments and tags, email templates and sends, and an onboarding checklist for new members.

The renewals screen is the one that earns its keep. It buckets members into due soon and in grace, deduplicated to each contact’s current term, so the question "who do I chase this week" has one screen and one answer. Duplicate contacts get their own review queue rather than accumulating quietly.

Nobody on staff opens CiviCRM’s administration screens. That is the point of the console: it covers the work a membership organization does, and the CRM stays behind it.

Operations

Multiglass runs the server and everything under it

Each organization gets its own CiviCRM instance, hosted and maintained on Multiglass infrastructure. Stripe payments arrive as contributions through an ingestion service rather than being re-keyed. Transactional mail goes out through Postmark on a separate sending reputation from bulk campaigns, because a sign-in link that lands in spam is a member who cannot get in.

The server, the upgrades and the backups are mine to worry about. Hosting is billed by Multiglass and itemised, rather than folded into a bundle you cannot take apart.

The edges

What it is not

If one of these is a dealbreaker, it is better to find out now than in month three.

Not a CRM you administer

If your organization wants to configure custom fields, write its own reports and run the CiviCRM admin itself, Perilla is the wrong shape. It is deliberately a narrower surface than the CRM underneath it.

Not self-serve

There is no signup page. An instance is provisioned for one organization, with its data migrated in, and that takes a conversation first.

Not a lock-in

CiviCRM is open source under the AGPL and the records are exportable. If the arrangement ends, the data leaves with you and the CRM keeps running for whoever hosts it next.

Specifics

What it is made of

System of record

CiviCRM, one isolated instance per organization

Member sign-in

Emailed magic link, 15-minute expiry, no member passwords

Card payments

Stripe, one-off and recurring

Offline gifts

Recorded by a coordinator against the same contact

Transactional email

Postmark, on its own sending reputation

Hosting

Managed by Multiglass; dedicated or shared server

Data

Exportable. CiviCRM is AGPL