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

Summary


This chapter outlined how to use CiviCRM to improve how you communicate with your organization's constituents. The first section focused on the broader topic of how communications should be aligned with the organization's overall CRM strategy.

Subsequent sections gradually built from sending an e-mail to one or a few constituents to sending out bulk e-mails to hundreds or thousands. Not all of the focus was on e-mail communications. We also looked at using CiviCRM to send bulk SMSes, print labels for postal mailings, record those mailings as activities for all the recipients, including a soft copy of the letter, and print personalized letters.

We then looked at strategies for list-building using CiviCRM profiles to enable users to subscribe to bulk e-mail products such as newspapers. While implementing profiles in recipe-style format, we took into consideration the differences and options present in the Drupal, Joomla!, and WordPress installations.

As lists are being built and constituents...