Every non-profit organization looking for software to manage their relationships, events, memberships, donations, campaigns, cases, workshops, volunteers, or any data involving their stakeholders should consider CiviCRM. CiviCRM is an open-source CRM tool specifically targeted at non-profit and the third sector, and anyone thinking about CiviCRM should read this book. It is a comprehensive guide to the functional possibilities of CiviCRM, but also discusses the community and organizational aspects of using CiviCRM. This second edition of the book complies with CiviCRM version 4.6.
Chapter 1, Achieving Your Mission with CiviCRM, introduces CiviCRM and how it can help you as a non-profit in achieving your mission.
Chapter 2, Planning Your CRM Implementation, will help you to plan for your CRM implementation based on the experiences of the authors.
Chapter 3, Installation, Configuration, and Maintenance, explains about the installation using the CMS Drupal, Joomla!, or WordPress and guides you through the configuration steps.
Chapter 4, CiviCRM Basics – Moving through the System and Working with Contacts, explains about the basic navigation and tells you about contacts, the heart of CiviCRM.
Chapter 5, Collecting, Organizing, and Importing Data, focuses on where your data would be collected from, how it can be segmented, and how data can be imported into CiviCRM.
Chapter 6, Communicating Better, deals with how you can communicate with your constituents and stakeholders using email and SMS and use groups to make communication easier.
Chapter 7, Campaigning with Petitions and Surveys, explains how CiviCampaign and its Survey and Petition components can help you with your campaigns.
Chapter 8, Fundraising for Your Mission, explains how CiviCRM can support and administer your fundraising efforts. The topics covered include segmentation, benchmarking, payment processors, contributions, and pledges.
Chapter 9, Growing Your Membership and Interacting with Members, deals with administering and managing memberships and how CiviCRM can support you interacting with your members.
Chapter 10, Managing Events, guides you through all aspects of CiviEvent that will support you in your event organization and management and interaction with event participants.
Chapter 11, Interacting with Constituents – Managing Cases, discusses how CiviCase can help you with case management for different purposes.
Chapter 12, Providing Support – Grant Management, details the CiviCRM functionality for grant management.
Chapter 13, Telling Your Story – Building Reports, explains how the reporting facilities of CiviCRM can be used with default reports and how you can enhance these reports to suit your specific needs.
Chapter 14, Customization, Community, and Cooperation, Cooperation gives you an introduction to customizing CiviCRM, how the CiviCRM community operates, and invites you to cooperate!
In addition to the CiviCRM software itself (freely available from http://civicrm.org), you will need either Drupal (http://drupal.org) or Joomla! (http://joomla.org) as the CMS framework in which CiviCRM will reside.
CiviCRM runs on an Apache/MySQL/PHP platform. It requires a fair amount of server system resources more than other web-based software, including Drupal or Joomla! running on their own. Virtual private servers available from commercial hosting providers are a good option for hosting, and dedicated servers with high-availability and high-performance server clusters can also be used in more demanding situations. While you may be able to run CiviCRM on shared hosting for small implementations, you will generally find the resource limitations problematic, particularly when your use of the software grows.
For testing purposes or in special circumstances where you want a personal instance, you can set up an implementation on a local machine running the following:
MAMP: www.mamp.info
WAMP: www.wampserver.com
Throughout this book, we assume you are running CiviCRM on a Linux operating system. Some of the configuration tasks require different procedures when running under Windows, which are not documented here. Unless you are familiar enough with Linux and Windows that you can translate accurately between crontab and scheduled tasks, file and directory permission systems, and simple Command Prompt/command-line commands, you should avoid using CiviCRM on a Windows environment.
This book deals with CiviCRM and thus addresses the Drupal/Joomla! environment as it pertains to CiviCRM integration. Though occasional mention is made of the other technologies used to implement CiviCRM (including PHP, MySQL, Apache, jQuery, and Smarty), no prior knowledge is required to install and configure the software.
The book is primarily for administrators tasked with implementing, configuring, maintaining, and updating CiviCRM and staff users who are looking to better understand the tools available in order to become power users. CiviCRM is software that may be used by advocacy groups, non-profit, and non-governmental organizations, elected officials, professional and trade associations, government entities, political campaigns and parties, and other similar organizations, and this book will prove useful to all such users.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code is set as follows:
.htaccess: php_value memory_limit 128M php_value register_globals off php_value max_execution_time 600 php.ini: memory_limit = 128M register_globals = off max_execution_time = 600
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
/usr/bin/drush -u 1 -r /path/to/drupal @sites civicrm-api job.execute auth=0 –y
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "All of your system configuration will be done through the Administer menu item."
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