Book Image

CiviCRM Cookbook

Book Image

CiviCRM Cookbook

Overview of this book

CiviCRM is a web-based, open source, Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) software geared toward meeting the needs of non-profit and other civic-sector organizations.Organizations realize their mission via CiviCRM through contact management, fundraising, event management, member management, mass e-mail marketing, peer-to-peer campaigns, case management, and much more.CiviCRM is localized in over 20 languages including: Chinese (Taiwan, China), Dutch, English (Australia, Canada, U.S., UK), French (France, Canada), German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Swedish.CiviCRM Cookbook will enhance your CiviCRM skills. It has recipes to help you use CiviCRM more efficiently, integrate it with CMSs, and also develop CiviCRM.This book begins with recipes that help save time and effort with CiviCRM. This is followed by recipes for organizing data more efficiently and managing profiles.Then you will learn authentication and authorization and managing communication with contacts.Then you will be guided on using the searching feature and preparing reports. We will then talk about integrating Drupal and CiviCRM. You will also be taught to manage events effectively. Finally, learn about CiviCampaign, Civimember, and developing CiviCRM.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
CiviCRM Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating and updating a smart group


Searching for contacts and doing something with the set of results is a day-to-day task in CiviCRM. For example, you might want to find all your contacts that live in Alaska and send them a mail shot. This is pretty easy to do in Advanced Search, and you can add all the contacts you find into a group called Alaska. This means that you can always go back to the group and find the contacts you added. The group represents a snapshot of your data that you took when you did the search and added contacts to the group.

The problem is that if new contacts are added into CiviCRM who live in Alaska, you will have to remember to add them to the group, and you will have to remove them from the group if they move from Alaska.

To overcome this problem, CiviCRM has smart groups. Smart groups automatically contain any contacts that match your search criteria. So, if the data in your contacts changes, or contacts are added or removed, this is reflected dynamically in the...