New Book: Using CiviCRM

CiviCRM is a web-based, open source CRM system, designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental organizations that integrates deeply with Drupal, including content, views and the permissioning system. Elected officials, professional/trade associations, political campaigns and parties, government agencies, and other similar organizations are among its growing number of enthusiastic users. Using CiviCRM shows you how to harness CiviCRM’s impressive array of possibilities as you develop and execute performance-critical CRM strategies.

This book will help you become familiar with the structure and main functions of CiviCRM. It will guide you in developing and successfully implementing a CRM strategy for your organization using detailed explanations and practical examples.

Using CiviCRM walks you through developing a CRM Implementation Plan that is suited to your organization's size, culture, and needs. Readers will take away many constituent relationship management best practices and the knowledge of how to implement them with CiviCRM. Benefits of Using CiviCRM will be felt across your organization, and help it better achieve its mission.

Overall, your organization will interact with constituents more effectively and handle staff growth and transitions by tracking all contacts and interactions with them in a system shared across the organization. Gathering and analyzing data about your constituents and their interactions with your organization will better inform your decisions.

If your organization fundraises, you’ll be able to raise more money and reduce costs by identifying qualified prospects for targeted fundraising initiatives. We show how to attract new prospects and convert them to donors using online, direct mail, telemarketing and direct contact channels Using CiviCRM. You’ll learn why and how to set up and then grow your monthly donor program, as well as improve the frequency, average donation amounts, and retention rates of your donor base.

With this book you’ll be able to reduce the burden on administrative resources by providing online payments and self-service options for event registrations and membership renewals. You can increase the likelihood your existing subscribers will become more involved with your organization, ensure more of your members show up to volunteer, identify potential leaders and steward their volunteer activities

Finally, you'll be making relevant information easily available that quantifies what a great job you've been doing, including the number of hours that volunteers gave to your organization last year, the number of cases managed, or the number of new viral signups from your latest urgent action e-mail.

This easy-to-understand book will guide you through building a well-formulated and well-executed CRM system that meets your organization's needs perfectly.

What you will learn from this book :

Create a successful CiviCRM implementation project
Install and configure CiviCRM in Joomla! or Drupal, understand advanced configuration options, and review the upgrade process in detail
Get comfortable with the CiviCRM interface and understand the basic contact functionality and concepts to perform various contact records-related operations
Collect data, organize it, and import it into the system to ensure smooth functioning of your projects
Use CiviCRM to communicate efficiently and track case history with constituents.
Build an integrated system to solicit, retain, and manage your donors and members through robust management and reporting tools for administrators
Take advantage of the many CiviCRM tools for generating both simple and complex event structures and managing registrants through every phase of the project
Integrate the grant management process with your other constituent management activities, making your organization a more efficient and productive financial support provider
Make reports using the various templates to retrieve, display and analyze your data

Approach

This book is a step-by-step tutorial with practical examples, introduced by a planning framework and illustrations of good relationship management techniques for a variety of situations. We begin with basics such as installation, low-level implementation, and CiviCRM's core modules before covering CiviCRM's advanced features and issues such as customization of CiviCRM and integrating it with Joomla! and Drupal. You should be able to quickly grasp and implement the basic elements of CiviCRM before moving on to the more advanced features and tools.

Who this book is written for

This book is for project implementers, organization leaders, staff, and volunteers in advocacy, non-profit, and non-governmental organizations, elected officials, professional/trade associations, political campaigns and parties, government agencies, and other similar organizations who want to implement CiviCRM in a manner tailored to their organization's size, culture, and needs. It addresses CRM strategists, implementers, administrators, and end users looking to become power users in communicating, fundraising, managing events, memberships, grants, cases, and people-resource management.

Sample Chapter

See Chapter 5: Managing Events.

About the Authors

Joseph Murray is the owner and principal of JMA Consulting, specialists in e-Advocacy, e-Consultation and Citizen Engagement for progressive organizations. He has extensive experience on non-profit boards, at senior levels of government, and running electoral, referendum and advocacy campaigns. JMA Consulting has provided CRM systems to hundreds of political campaigns tracking interactions with tens of millions of voters, as well as providing Drupal and CiviCRM strategy, implementation, development and training services to numerous non-profit and advocacy groups.

Joe has served on the CiviCRM Community Advisory Group, and is a Director of the Toronto Drupal Users Group.

Brian Shaughnessy is the owner and principal of Lighthouse Consulting & Design, a web development firm specializing in Joomla! and CiviCRM implementations. For over ten years, Brian worked with an association management company providing services to not-for-profit professional, trade, and charitable organizations. Upon starting his own business, he channeled that experience into effective implementations of CiviCRM for not-for-profits. He has worked with organizations around the world, helping to achieve greater efficiencies and expand functionality through CiviCRM.

Brian has served on the CiviCRM Community Advisory Group and helped author the first edition of Understanding CiviCRM (later renamed CiviCRM: A Comprehensive Guide). He has worked with the core development team to provide end user training and maintains a strong working relationship with the project leaders. Brian has also been active in the Joomla! project, serving on the Google Summer of Code program as a Joomla! mentor. He has provided professional Joomla! training through TechnicalLead.com.