At the end of January, Pooka hosted our third CiviCRM Scotland Meetup, bringing together people working with CiviCRM across charities, membership organisations, and community groups.
This time, we focused on a tool that comes up again and again in conversations with organisations managing spaces, rooms, resources, and events: CiviBooking.
We were joined live (from a very snowy Montreal) by Mathieu Lu from Symbiotic Coop, one of the cooperatives now maintaining and actively improving CiviBooking.
Bringing together real-world users, implementers, and the people responsible for the code, is what CiviCRM meetups are about, and we encourage you to get involved.
What is CiviBooking?
CiviBooking is an extension for CiviCRM that lets organisations manage bookings for rooms, spaces, equipment, and resources, directly inside their CRM.
Typical use cases include:
- Community organisations hiring out meeting rooms
- Cultural venues managing shared spaces
- Membership organisations coordinating room use with partners
- Teams that need bookings, invoicing, and contact records to live in one place.
Instead of juggling spreadsheets, emails, calendar tools, and separate invoicing systems, CiviBooking brings everything together inside CiviCRM.
During the demo, Mathieu showed how an administrator can:
- Select a date, room, and time slot
- Add resources (like projectors or furniture)
- Apply pricing, discounts, or additional charges
- Link the booking to an existing contact — or create a new one
- Send confirmation emails and manage booking status
Crucially, bookings aren’t “floating” somewhere else, they’re part of your CRM data.
Why CiviBooking Works So Well With CiviCRM
One of the strongest takeaways from the session was how deeply integrated CiviBooking is with the rest of CiviCRM.
Every booking:
- Appears on the contact record
- Can generate a contribution and invoice
- Sits alongside activities, relationships, memberships, and communications
That means your bookings data isn’t siloed. It becomes part of the wider picture of how someone interacts with your organisation.
From a reporting and admin point of view, this is huge. You can answer questions like:
- Who is booking our spaces most often?
- Which bookings convert into donations or memberships?
- How do bookings relate to wider engagement with our organisation?
The booking dashboard itself is built using CiviCRM’s newer SearchKit, which means it’s flexible and customisable without heavy development work.
For small teams especially, this kind of joined-up data can save a lot of time and headspace.
Who Is CiviBooking For?
CiviBooking is particularly well suited to organisations that:
- Already use (or are considering) CiviCRM
- Manage physical spaces or shared resources
- Wish they had fewer systems to look after
- Want a member’s booking information to sit right next to their other information, e.g. contact details, membership subscriptions, donations, comms emails, legacy and gift aid pledges, records of phone calls, major donor tags…
It’s not trying to be a glossy, standalone booking platform. Its strength is that it sits inside your existing CRM, working with the data you already rely on.
That makes it a great fit for charities, third sector organisations, and membership bodies where context matters just as much as the booking itself.
A Quick Word on Stability and Maintenance
CiviBooking has been around since 2013, and like many long-running open source tools, its journey hasn’t been linear.
As Mathieu explained, development slowed around 2020, and for a while the extension struggled to keep pace with newer CiviCRM versions. Community members contributed fixes, but there wasn’t a dedicated maintainer.
That’s changed.
In the last year, new development work (including significant improvements by developer Duncan White) has stabilised the extension, refreshed the interface, and aligned it with modern CiviCRM features.
The result is a tool the maintainers now feel confident recommending again, although they acknowledge huge opportunities to develop it further.
Why Open Source (and Access to Maintainers) Is Key
One of the most valuable parts of this meetup wasn’t just the demo, it was the conversation.
Because CiviCRM and CiviBooking are open source projects, users aren’t locked out of the process. You can:
- Speak directly to the people maintaining the software
- Raise issues based on real-world use
- Suggest improvements that benefit everyone, not just your organisation.
If an idea is solid, useful, and aligns with the project’s direction, it can genuinely become part of the software.
That’s very different from proprietary platforms, where feature requests disappear into support tickets and roadmaps you never see.
Open source doesn’t just mean “free as in cost” it means shared ownership, transparency, and collaboration. This meetup was a practical example of that in action.
Watch the Session and Explore Further
If you couldn’t join us on the day, you can catch up with the full session and explore the tools discussed here:
- CiviBooking extension: https://civicrm.org/extensions/civibooking
- CiviBooking on GitHub: https://github.com/compucorp/civibooking
- Symbiotic Coop: https://www.symbiotic.coop/en
The session featured a live demo and discussion led by Mathieu Lu, hosted as part of our January CiviCRM Scotland Meetup.
CiviCRM meetup
Join the Next CiviCRM Scotland Meetup
We’ll be back on 30 April, and we’re always open to topic suggestions, whether that’s a specific extension, a workflow problem you’re wrestling with, or something you’d like to share with other users.
These meetups are about learning together, asking better questions, and making tools like CiviCRM work properly for the organisations that rely on them.
If that sounds like your kind of conversation, we’d love to see you there.
