Many churches are using multiple systems. For example our church uses the Fellowship One Church Mgt. system, Constant Contact, Drupal and we have tried the Table Project http://tableproject.org/. My concern is that we are getting fragmented, with applications on different systems and multiple databases. All these system result in a confusing mess.
Drupal is moving in the direction of an application platform and beyond just a CMS. The core tools provided by Drupal Core, Drupal Commerce and the recent addition of CRM Core http://drupal.org/project/crm_core provide the basis components to build a complete church management and communication system.
I am posting this with the hope we can generate some discussion and ideas on if and how Drupal could be a complete solution.
Thanks,
Jeff Locke
Comments
I don't think the issue is
I don't think the issue is necessarily having several 3rd party systems, bc that is essentially the world we live in now with the distributed web. The challenge is finding systems that integrate well with each other. I think for example that using a project in development like CRM core probably isn't the answer.
As for your other examples, Constant Contact integrates well with Drupal but the other 2 things you mentioned, Fellowship One and Table Project, do not. Fellowship One does have an API but I doubt there is enough of a groundswell for a module to be created for Drupal. The Table Project looks like it is a web front end and so you wouldn't likely have TP and Drupal, it would be one or the other.
Many have tried to create a CRM for Drupal and I haven't seen one over the years that really knocks my socks off, I would tend to use a more established CRM out there that can integrate with Drupal.
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I'm of the opposite opinion.
I'm of the opposite opinion. I think that we might be on the verge of being able to put together a basic system in Drupal that accomplishes being the central hub for a church much more effectively than was possible in the past. I'm sure you're right that we don't want to try to build a stable system on an unstable CRM foundation. But the impression I get is that there is actually real progress being made in the CRM front right now, and crm_core could become a stable, basic starting point in the coming months. And if not that, then one of the other two major CRM initiatives might be doable.
The point isn't necessarily to do away with other services, as you said. But almost all of the functionality that I need from Fellowship One can be built fairly easily in Drupal once a basic CRM is in place. I'd still be making use of Facebook, Mailchimp (or Constant Contact) and maybe even the Table Project eventually, depending on what direction they take it and what they open up in terms of APIs.
I'm really looking forward to this conversation, and I want to try to get it off the ground. So here goes.
What does the basic system need to be able to do?
- Track contacts
- Track relationships between contacts
- Track church-specific data, such as baptism & membership dates
- Allow those contacts to be put into groups
- Easily send emails to those groups of contacts
Anybody else want to jump in?
If we build a ChMS solution
If we build a ChMS solution in drupal, using the CRM modules that are cropping up (redhen is another one), then we've already gone a long way to satisfying the basic needs of many smallish churches. Two more important features that come after what jtbayly has already mentioned:
"Meeee toooo"
Our church uses Servant Keeper, which is a Windows program, not hooked to the web and fairly limited in what it does, although it has a pretty flexible report generation capability. We use report generation to write a couple of CSV files which can be imported via Feeds to populate our website membership directory.
The church secretaries would really like a web-based ChMS (we've discussed getting out of Servant Keeper and they're ready to move), and they're already doing some things on the website, so that would be a natural extension of some things they do.
The needed basics are some data types that can be done with CCK: people (including a member flag), family (collection of people at the same address), groups (collections of people). There needs to be a way to track attendance and donations (for those essential end-of-year IRS-required letters). As ldweeks mentioned, events, reservations/tickets, event check-in would be nice. A variant of events is kid check-in for Sunday school classes, and printing nametags.
The more of these features that can be hit, the better, but we would use a fairly limited subset of these. One decent, fairly basic open-source ChMS is churchinfo.
Redhen
Thanks for posting the redhen info. It's interesting that 2 well established Drupal shops are working on CRM projects. I think it confirms the need, especially considering that both shops certainly have experience with CiviCRM and Salesforce and wouldn't reinvent the wheel if they didn't have a good reason. Both CRM projects seem to have good potential. I would guess that both will rely on Drupal Commerce for financial transactions. Evaluating these two projects should be a good learning experience.
Need is definitely there
I should also point out that Think Shout is also doing heavy development on the Entity Registration module. It looks like it will be the tool that we've all be waiting for (well, at least that I've been waiting for) to build registration system in Drupal.
I'm not sure what else is on their roadmap, but it wouldn't surprise me if they've got more good ideas in the pipeline.
Ya I have looked CiviCRM
Ya I have looked CiviCRM before which has been around forever and I would think has pretty good community support. I have never been of the mind that it would be a good idea to build a front end site on top of CiviCRM, rather it would be treated as a separate site altogether bc it is a bit of a monster underneath.
I maintain a church distro called OpenChurch which is a front-end for a church site. I would be open to integrating with a CRM like CiviCRM or something else if I thought there was something that was useful enough and popular enough that people would want to use it.
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@drupalninja99 - I saw that
@drupalninja99 - I saw that you were the maintainer of OpenChurch - thank you for the good work!
I have actually spent a fair amount of time in CiviCRM, and I just am not ever interested in touching it again. I suppose the big shops have the resources to wrangle CiviCRM into fitting their needs. I have known a lot about CiviCRM for a while, though, and I'm still not willing to implement it for my church because of all the pain involved in getting it to work right and be integrated with my drupal websites.
Again, I am very excited about using either redhen or crm_core, though, because we would be getting all the integration into our actual website for "free". And if my constituent data is in drupal, then I can use all the regular drupal tools (views in particular) to build out what I need.
I have used civiCRM on 3
I have used civiCRM on 3 production sites. It's a very solid platform that integrates fairly well with Drupal. In my opinion it will never be a great solution for Drupal because it is also continuously being developed to work with Joomla and now, WordPress. Because it is serving a wide range of users it is bloated. That said, it is still one of the best options for a full blown CRM, but is, as you say, a monster underneath.
I have been actively involved with Fellowship One(F1) for the past 18 months. It's a solid system, but very dated and the event management is not user friendly. As you may know F1 was purchased by Active Network. They own other platforms like ServiceU. F1 is undergoing a major rewrite and will probably incorporate some of the ServiceU functionality. I'm sure they will offer a CMS as well. Of course, this will all come at a cost. I think they will be a strong contender in the market.
The Table Project offers some really good functionality, but a user needs to leave the church website and login to another platform. It can integrate to a small degree with F1. I think much of their functionality could be easily done in Drupal, especially by adding Organic Groups.
If all this functionality could be done with a single user login, it would be fantastic. Having OpenChurch as a starting point would really make sense.
OpenChurch as a base
I'd certainly like to see a distribution built, in the end, and I agree it would make sense to build it on a system that also is designed to provide a website designed for churches. OpenChurch is the best I know of in that regard.
However, I'm not sure exactly how that would work with sites that don't want to use the OpenChurch front-end. Is it even possible to support both?
Ya obviously if there was a
Ya obviously if there was a CRM either Drupal-based or a 3rd party one that was really popular then it would be worth investigating at a high level how the two could be integrated.
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When you say "sites that
When you say "sites that don't want to use the OpenChurch front-end" are you thinking it would still be a Drupal site? There would only be one code base for the website and all the additional CRM and Commerce functionality and that would be Drupal. You could use the theme and layout from OpenChurch or use another. OpenChurch makes a great starting point.
Of course this is putting the cart well before the horse, since we are only discussing the idea.
Yeah, it's getting ahead of
Yeah, it's getting ahead of ourselves. I'm just thinking that OpenChurch is a distribution. In my mind, we're talking about creating a distribution here, too. I don't know how you can mix two distributions together. That's all.
It's probably fair to say
It's probably fair to say that we, as a group, can't do much until the two CRM projects are further along. Trellon plans to release a distribution and include Drupal Commerce functionality and some other features. I would expect RedHen to do something similar. Unfortunately, we don't know what their time frames are. They probably don't know, themselves.
This is a good video made by one of the Trellon guys http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TSqtoAumpE
I am going to put up a test site and start trying these modules and see what they actually do.
The fact that Trellon is
The fact that Trellon is behind it is really good, bc that means it is probably going to be solid when they get a stable release out. I don't know enough ab what a CRM distro would look like to have an idea as to where it would integrate with a Distro like OpenChurch.
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