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

Importing contact and activity data


Profiles provide excellent tools for empowering constituents to work with their own record or to construct simplified data entry forms for your organization staff. However, quite often you are working with a large number of contact records that must be added to your system, which may be too many to efficiently enter manually through a profile form.

It's also very likely that your CiviCRM implementation project will involve some migration of data from an existing legacy system. Even if you're a start-up not-for-profit, you are likely to have some contact records obtained from an external source that will seed your CRM database.

CiviCRM provides some powerful interface tools to import records from CSV, files, or from a record set specified by an SQL query. Even with a very powerful interface, there will be some work to do with your existing data to prepare it for import.

Let's take a moment to review the import interface and then retrace our steps to understand...