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

In this chapter, we walked through the installation of CiviCRM in Joomla!, Drupal, and WordPress, discussed the upgrade process and development cycle, completed an initial configuration of the system, and reviewed basic maintenance steps to keep your system running smoothly.

By now, you should have CiviCRM installed, configured, and ready to begin working with.

Before diving into the operation and functionality in CiviCRM, we will briefly review several fictional case studies in the next chapter that will be used throughout the rest of the book. CiviCRM is rich with features and possible use cases—so much so that it could be easy to get so caught up in what buttons to push that you miss the potential applications to your organization. Our hope is that the fictional case studies, which will weave their way into the functionality discussions throughout the book, will help you see the possibilities in pseudo-real life ways. So be sure to read through them as you journey through...