Book Image

Using CiviCRM - Second Edition

By : Erik Hommel, Joseph Murray, Brian P Shaughnessy
Book Image

Using CiviCRM - Second Edition

By: Erik Hommel, Joseph Murray, Brian 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 (20 chapters)
Using CiviCRM - Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we've seen how CiviCRM provides robust membership management and reporting tools for administrators and the ability to expose member sign-up and renewal forms to your website. Specifically, we walked through the essential configuration steps required to get up and running with membership management in CiviCRM, taking time to understand the core concepts with how CiviCRM deals with membership records. We reviewed the tools available for monitoring and tracking your membership records, and saw how individual membership records are handled within the contact record. We also set up a website form to allow contacts to join or renew their membership, while discussing the broader options available for contribution campaigns, and understood how the membership search tool can be used to find subsets of members, in particular with regard to the various date fields. We stepped through the creation of membership reports from one of the three membership report templates. We took...