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

Community and cooperation


As alluded to in the last section, CiviCRM is as much about a community of developers, integrators, implementers, administrators, and end users, as it is an off-the-shelf piece of software. The reason CiviCRM can be offered for free and has such a robust history of new features and new versions is because organizations and developers have supported it financially and through active code contributions.

Whether you intended to or not, when you began using CiviCRM you became part of that community. The more you get engaged in that community, the more opportunities you will have to grow, learn from, and contribute to the community. There are several ways to get more involved.

A growing way to learn about and share experiences with CiviCRM is local meet-ups. These relatively informal events generally include demonstrations of how people in an area are using CiviCRM, perhaps some technical discussion, and a chance to chat and ask questions. So far, there have been meet...