Book Image

Using CiviCRM

Book Image

Using CiviCRM

Overview of this book

CiviCRM is a web-based, open source CRM system, designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental organizations. Elected officials, professional/trade associations, political campaigns and parties, government agencies, and other similar organizations are among its growing number of enthusiastic users. This book shows you how to harness CiviCRM’s impressive array of possibilities as you develop and execute performance-critical CRM strategies. This book will help you become familiar with the structure and main functions of CiviCRM. It will guide you in developing and successfully implementing a CRM strategy for your organization using detailed explanations and practical examples. Using CiviCRM walks you through developing a CRM Implementation Plan that is suited to your organization's size, culture, and needs. Readers will take away many constituent relationship management best practices and the knowledge of how to implement them with CiviCRM. Benefits of Using CiviCRM will be felt across your organization, and help it better achieve its mission. Overall, your organization will interact with constituents more effectively and handle staff growth and transitions by tracking all contacts and interactions with them in a system shared across the organization. Gathering and analyzing data about your constituents and their interactions with your organization will better inform your decisions. If your organization fundraises, you’ll be able to raise more money and reduce costs by identifying qualified prospects for targeted fundraising initiatives. We show how to attract new prospects and convert them to donors using online, direct mail, telemarketing and direct contact channels Using CiviCRM. You’ll learn why and how to set up and then grow your monthly donor program, as well as improve the frequency, average donation amounts, and retention rates of your donor base. With this book you’ll be able to reduce the burden on administrative resources by providing online payments and self-service options for event registrations and membership renewals. You can increase the likelihood your existing subscribers will become more involved with your organization, ensure more of your members show up to volunteer, identify potential leaders and steward their volunteer activities Finally, you'll be making relevant information easily available that quantifies what a great job you've been doing, including the number of hours that volunteers gave to your organization last year, the number of cases managed, or the number of new viral signups from your latest urgent action e-mail.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Using CiviCRM
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Working with memberships and daily management tools


As you work with membership records, you will want to easily access a snapshot of how your members are trending, search for members by specific type, status, or other criteria, and work with individual contacts and their membership details. CiviCRM provides a host of tools to do these things.

From the main navigation bar, do a quick review of the Membership menu:

  • Dashboard: Provides a summary of current members by type and date range

  • New Membership: Lets you create a new membership record quickly

  • Find Members: Provides tools for searching through the member records

  • Import Memberships: Allows you to take records created in your previous system or other source and import them into the system

We won't review each of these tools in depth, but will take some time to highlight key features and considerations.

The Dashboard is a great way to quickly achieve a system snapshot of members. Remember when we configured membership status rules and there...