CiviCRM is a web-based, open source Constituent Relationship Management (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.
Throughout this book, we will review the structure and main functionality of CiviCRM as we guide you in developing and successfully implementing a CRM strategy for your organization using detailed explanations and practical examples.
In addition, we will discuss organizational processes/workflows that are impacted by CiviCRM, providing guidance as you review and analyze your internal operations with regard to the CRM implementation. We will present best practices of constituent relationship management and provide guidance on how to effectively implement them with CiviCRM. The benefits of using CiviCRM will be felt across your organization, helping to better achieve your mission.
Using CiviCRM, your organization will interact with constituents more effectively and handle staffing changes more smoothly by tracking contacts and interactions with them in a unified system shared across the organization. Organization leadership will use data gathered from constituents to analyze and inform their decision making process.
If your organization raises funds through donations, contributions, event fees, and membership, you'll be able to raise more money and reduce costs by identifying qualified prospects for targeted fundraising initiatives. We will demonstrate how to attract new prospects and convert them to donors using online, direct mail, telemarketing, and direct contact channels using CiviCRM. You will learn why and how to set up and grow your monthly donor program, as well as improve the frequency, average donation amounts, and retention rates of your donor base.
With CiviCRM, 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 of your existing constituents becoming more involved with your organization, ensuring more of your members show up to volunteer, identifying potential leaders, and stewarding their volunteer activities.
Finally, you will 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, membership retention rates, event participation statistics, or the number of new viral signups from your latest urgent action e-mail.
This easy-to-understand book will guide you through building a well-formulated and a well-executed CRM system that meets your organization's needs perfectly.
Chapter 1, Achieving Your Mission with CiviCRM helps you understand the goal, purpose, and function of a CRM, looking beyond the technology to the underlying objectives and benefits of a unified approach to contact and communication management. In this chapter, you learn how CiviCRM can be used to effectively and efficiently meet these objectives.
Chapter 2, Planning Your CRM Implementation shows you how to review critical steps and considerations as you plan your CRM implementation, including project management methods, building the project team, and setting realistic yet effective goals.
Chapter 3, Installation, Configuration, and Maintenance shows you how to systematically and comprehensively review the installation and initial configuration process for CiviCRM, while learning about core concepts and how they will affect the way you track and manage information. In this chapter, you will also establish a path for ongoing maintenance and updates.
Chapter 4, CiviCRM Basics: Moving through the System and Working with Contacts shows you how to see your data through the lens of the contact record and learn how to create, edit, and work with the contact and its related records, including relationships, activities, notes, tags, and groups. Begin using the various search tools to find and work with multiple contacts through bulk actions.
Chapter 5, Collecting, Organizing, and Importing Data shows you how to create custom data fields for different purposes and organize them along with core information fields into profiles for data entry, searching, and listing. Walk through the data import process, from pre-process data scrubbing and structural clean-up to import options and field mapping.
Chapter 6, Communicating Better takes your message to the masses through effective communication. It helps you understand how CiviCRM tools can be harnessed through an integrated approach to send, track, and measure the effectiveness of your printed, spoken, and digital communications.
Chapter 7, Fundraising: Money for Your Mission teaches you how to develop a fundraising plan and how to configure the tools to promote and track your efforts. In this chapter, you will also work with contributions through the contact record and other management tools.
Chapter 8, Growing Your Membership and Interacting with Members shows you how to configure the system for your membership needs and understand the core concepts of member tracking in CiviCRM. You can use online forms to solicit new members and encourage renewals, and track, search, and report on member activity.
Chapter 9, Managing Events shows you how to step through the event creation wizard, understanding the various options for handling registrations, waitlists, and approval-based workflows. Promote your event through event information and registration pages, and RSS/iCal/HTML lists. Track registrations as they come in and work with the participant details through the contact record, attendance lists, and reports.
Chapter 10, Interacting with Constituents: Managing Cases makes you understand the purpose and key concepts of case management while reviewing possible uses that could be of value to your organization. You also configure a case type with custom activities and a timeline workflow, and review the management and tracking tools available as you seek case resolution.
Chapter 11, Providing Support: Grant Management shows you how you can improve the ways you support constituents through grant dissemination using CiviCRM's grant tracking tools. It also shows how you can manage the application and approval process and later track monetary disbursements and reporting requirements.
Chapter 12, Telling Your Story: Building Reports helps you tell the story of your organization through reports, having now covered the full set of features and functionality provided by CiviCRM.
Chapter 13 , Customization, Community, and Cooperation makes you look ahead to future versions of CiviCRM, understand the essential best practices for customizing your installation, and learn how your involvement in the CiviCRM community can help support your organization while advancing the software.
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 some 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:
MAMP: www.mamp.info
WAMP: www.wampserver.com
Throughout this book, we have assumed you are running CiviCRM on a Linux operating system. Some of the configuration tasks require different procedures when running under Windows that 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.
This book is for project implementers, organization leaders, staff, and volunteers in advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental organizations, election campaigns, professional/trade associations, political campaigns and parties, government agencies, and other similar organizations who want to implement CiviCRM in a manner tailored to their organization's size, culture, and needs. It addresses CRM strategists, implementers, administrators, and end users looking to become power users in communicating, fundraising, managing events, memberships, grants, cases, and people-resource management.
In this book you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Adding &search=0 will open the page with just a listing (no search form)."
A block of code is set as follows:
{if $receipt_text}
{$receipt_text}
{/if}
{if $is_pay_later}New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Access these options through Administer | CiviMember".
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