Book Image

Using CiviCRM - Second Edition

By : Hommel, Murray, P Shaughnessy
Book Image

Using CiviCRM - Second Edition

By: Hommel, Murray, P Shaughnessy

Overview of this book

CiviCRM provides a powerful toolbox of resources to help organizations manage relationships with constituents. It is free, open source, web-based, and geared specifically to meet the constituent relationship management needs of the not-for-profit sector. Beginning with broader questions about how your organization is structured, which existing workflows are critical to your operations, and the overarching purpose of a centralized CRM, the book proceeds step by step through configuring CiviCRM, understanding the choices when setting up the system, importing data, and exploring the breadth of tools available throughout the system. You will see how to best use this software to handle event registrations, accept and track contributions, manage paid and free memberships and subscriptions, segment contacts, send bulk e-mails with open and click-through tracking, manage outreach campaigns, and set up case management workflows that match your organization’s roles and rules. With specific emphasis on helping implementers ask the right questions, consider key principals when setting up the system, and understand usage through case studies and examples, the book comprehensively reviews the functionality of CiviCRM and the opportunities it provides. With this book, you can help your organization better achieve its mission as a charity, industry association, professional society, political advocacy group, community group, government agency, or other similar organization and position yourself to become a power user who efficiently and effectively navigates the system.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
15
Index

Summary


For many organizations, events are the only opportunity that constituents have to see the face of your organization. How you manage your event and what tools you have to effectively track and report on the success of the event will ultimately impact your bottom line. CiviCRM provides tremendous tools for generating both simple and complex structures and managing registrants through every phase of the project.

In this chapter, we walked through the configuration of events and discussed in detail the many options available and reviewed how an event registration impacts the contact record. We even registered a contact administratively and understood best practices when working within the backend environment. We discovered how CiviCRM calculates participant counts and how these can be effectively used to track the registration progress. We ran searches for participants and took bulk action on the resulting records, and generated reports to summarize event income details and produce attendee...