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

Forms to solicit new members and retain the existing ones


Having great administrative tools is wonderful, but we also want to be able to expose the membership signup and renewal pages on our website in order to solicit new members and retain existing members. In CiviCRM, we do this through a contribution page.

Contribution pages are used to solicit funds from site visitors. This may be for general donations, sponsorships, pledges, campaigns, or in our case, memberships. Begin by visiting Contributions | New Contribution.

We will not review all of the options available in the contribution page configuration, as that has been covered in depth in the previous chapter. We will focus on the key elements pertinent to membership signup pages.

In the Title tab, you will see a Financial Type field. Its use, for our purposes, can be a bit misleading. As you recall, when we defined membership types we assigned a financial type to each. When processing memberships through a contribution page, whatever...