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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Develop and implement a fully-functional, systematic CRM plan with CiviCRM
About This Book
- Develop an integrated online system that manages contacts, donations, event registrations, memberships, bulk e-mail, campaigns, case management, and other functions such as activity tracking, grant distribution, and reporting.
- Plan a constituency relationship management strategy with ladders of engagement that will improve how your organization realizes its mission.
- Use case studies and step-by-step examples to put the raw concepts into real-life terminology and build your solutions.
Who This Book Is For
The book is primarily for administrators tasked with implementing, configuring, maintaining, and updating CiviCRM, and staff users who are looking to better understand the tools available in order to become power users. CiviCRM is software that may be used by advocacy groups, non-profit, and non-governmental organizations, elected officials, professional and trade associations, government entities, political campaigns and parties, and other similar organizations, and this book will prove useful to all such users.
What You Will Learn
- Install and configure your CiviCRM
- Analyze your current workflows and processes to translate them effectively into the CiviCRM model
- Build an integrated system to solicit, retain, and manage your donors and members through robust management and reporting tools for administrators
- Raise more money with CiviCRM with effective solicitation campaigns
- Market events effectively and track registrations and payments
- Improve communications with constituents using targeted broadcast e-mail campaigns
- Track ongoing communications with constituents including from Outlook and Gmail using activities and case management tools
- Take advantage of the many CiviCRM tools to generate both simple and complex event structures and manage registrants through every phase of the project
In Detail
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.
Style and approach
This guide is packed with step-by-step tutorials and real-life examples interspersed with practical advice and best practices on how to use CiviCRM strategically. You will be able to quickly grasp and implement the basic elements of CiviCRM before moving on to more advanced tools.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Using CiviCRM - Second Edition
Using CiviCRM - Second Edition
Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: August 2016
Production reference: 1290816
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78328-145-9
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Credits
Authors
Erik Hommel
Joseph Murray
Brian P. Shaughnessy
Commissioning Editor
Pramila Balan
Acquisition Editor
Larissa Pinto
Content Development Editor
Trusha Shriyan
Technical Editor
Naveenkumar Jain
Copy Editors
Safis Editing
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Project Coordinator
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Safis Editing
Indexer
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Graphics
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Production Coordinator
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Cover Work
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About the Authors
Erik Hommel has been an active member of the CiviCRM community since 2009.
He is one of the founders of CiviCooP (http://www.civicoop.org) and one of the partners in EE-atWork (http://www.ee-atwork.nl). With both organizations, he has supported CiviCRM implementation and customization projects with customers such as MAF Norge, Amnesty International Flanders, De Goede Woning, PUM Senior Experts, Wikimedia The Netherlands, and many more, as a project manager/developer/consultant.
Erik has hosted sessions at CiviCon in London and Amsterdam, and several CiviCRM Developer Training workshops. He has taken part in the development of a number of extensions for CiviCRM and has taken part in several CiviCRM sprints in Europe.
You can find Erik regularly on the CiviCRM Stack Exchange site, the IRC channel, and at CiviCRM events in North West Europe.
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 nonprofit boards, at senior levels of government, and in 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 CiviCRM, Drupal, and Wordpress strategy, implementation, development, and training services to numerous nonprofits, associations, and advocacy groups. JMA Consulting has published extensions for CiviCRM integrating it with mail, social media, chat, and other services, as well as enhancing the core functionality for grants and other areas.
Joe is an active contributor to the CiviCRM ecosystem, and assists the CiviCRM core team in areas including accounting functionality, sponsorships, and community governance.
I'd like to extend tremendous thanks to Brian for shouldering the burden of the rewrite for this second edition yet keeping me as co-author. Thanks to Donald Lobo and Dave Greenberg for founding CiviCRM and seeing it through its first 10 years. And thanks to Tim Otten, Coleman Watts, and Josh Gowans for taking over as the next generation of CiviCRM core team leaders as we begin 2016—you'll do a great job coordinating this amazing open source community.
Brian P. Shaughnessy is the owner and principal of Lighthouse Consulting & Design, a web development firm specializing in CiviCRM implementations for Joomla!, Drupal, and WordPress. Brian previously worked with a communication firm serving not-for-profit professional, trade, and charitable organizations for over 10 years. After starting his own business, he channeled that experience into effective implementations of CiviCRM for not-for-profits and government institutions. He has worked with organizations around the world, helping them to achieve greater efficiencies and expand functionality through CiviCRM.
Brian is very active in the CiviCRM community, regularly contributing code to the core software, speaking at CiviCon events, and helping to lead a local user group in the Albany, NY area. In the past he has worked with the core development team to provide end-user training and maintains a strong working relationship with the project leaders.
He extends his appreciation to the core team—particularly the founders, Dave and Lobo—as well as the many other core team developers and community developers around the world who have helped make CiviCRM a powerful tool in the hands of not-for-profits, community organizations, and government institutions.
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Preface
Every non-profit organization looking for software to manage their relationships, events, memberships, donations, campaigns, cases, workshops, volunteers, or any data involving their stakeholders should consider CiviCRM. CiviCRM is an open-source CRM tool specifically targeted at non-profit and the third sector, and anyone thinking about CiviCRM should read this book. It is a comprehensive guide to the functional possibilities of CiviCRM, but also discusses the community and organizational aspects of using CiviCRM. This second edition of the book complies with CiviCRM version 4.6.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Achieving Your Mission with CiviCRM, introduces CiviCRM and how it can help you as a non-profit in achieving your mission.
Chapter 2, Planning Your CRM Implementation, will help you to plan for your CRM implementation based on the experiences of the authors.
Chapter 3, Installation, Configuration, and Maintenance, explains about the installation using the CMS Drupal, Joomla!, or WordPress and guides you through the configuration steps.
Chapter 4, CiviCRM Basics – Moving through the System and Working with Contacts, explains about the basic navigation and tells you about contacts, the heart of CiviCRM.
Chapter 5, Collecting, Organizing, and Importing Data, focuses on where your data would be collected from, how it can be segmented, and how data can be imported into CiviCRM.
Chapter 6, Communicating Better, deals with how you can communicate with your constituents and stakeholders using email and SMS and use groups to make communication easier.
Chapter 7, Campaigning with Petitions and Surveys, explains how CiviCampaign and its Survey and Petition components can help you with your campaigns.
Chapter 8, Fundraising for Your Mission, explains how CiviCRM can support and administer your fundraising efforts. The topics covered include segmentation, benchmarking, payment processors, contributions, and pledges.
Chapter 9, Growing Your Membership and Interacting with Members, deals with administering and managing memberships and how CiviCRM can support you interacting with your members.
Chapter 10, Managing Events, guides you through all aspects of CiviEvent that will support you in your event organization and management and interaction with event participants.
Chapter 11, Interacting with Constituents – Managing Cases, discusses how CiviCase can help you with case management for different purposes.
Chapter 12, Providing Support – Grant Management, details the CiviCRM functionality for grant management.
Chapter 13, Telling Your Story – Building Reports, explains how the reporting facilities of CiviCRM can be used with default reports and how you can enhance these reports to suit your specific needs.
Chapter 14, Customization, Community, and Cooperation, Cooperation gives you an introduction to customizing CiviCRM, how the CiviCRM community operates, and invites you to cooperate!
What you need for this book
In addition to the CiviCRM software itself (freely available from http://civicrm.org), you will need either Drupal (http://drupal.org) or Joomla! (http://joomla.org) as the CMS framework in which CiviCRM will reside.
CiviCRM runs on an Apache/MySQL/PHP platform. It requires a fair amount of server system resources more than other web-based software, including Drupal or Joomla! running on their own. Virtual private servers available from commercial hosting providers are a good option for hosting, and dedicated servers with high-availability and high-performance server clusters can also be used in more demanding situations. While you may be able to run CiviCRM on shared hosting for small implementations, you will generally find the resource limitations problematic, particularly when your use of the software grows.
For testing purposes or in special circumstances where you want a personal instance, you can set up an implementation on a local machine running the following:
Throughout this book, we assume you are running CiviCRM on a Linux operating system. Some of the configuration tasks require different procedures when running under Windows, which are not documented here. Unless you are familiar enough with Linux and Windows that you can translate accurately between crontab and scheduled tasks, file and directory permission systems, and simple Command Prompt/command-line commands, you should avoid using CiviCRM on a Windows environment.
This book deals with CiviCRM and thus addresses the Drupal/Joomla! environment as it pertains to CiviCRM integration. Though occasional mention is made of the other technologies used to implement CiviCRM (including PHP, MySQL, Apache, jQuery, and Smarty), no prior knowledge is required to install and configure the software.
Who this book is for
The book is primarily for administrators tasked with implementing, configuring, maintaining, and updating CiviCRM and staff users who are looking to better understand the tools available in order to become power users. CiviCRM is software that may be used by advocacy groups, non-profit, and non-governmental organizations, elected officials, professional and trade associations, government entities, political campaigns and parties, and other similar organizations, and this book will prove useful to all such users.
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Chapter 1. Achieving Your Mission with CiviCRM
Most people working in the non-profit sector would love it if their organization could do more with its existing staff and resources. We often care passionately about our organization's mission and the work we do, but lament the lost productivity spent with inefficient tools. Wasted hours, wasted money, wasted contacts, and wasted opportunities become the source of endless frustration! We want to make a difference — a bigger difference — and find the best tools to help us achieve those goals.
Why you need Constituent Relationship Management
Your organization probably has defined its mission and has a clear picture of what it wants to achieve. Obviously, constituents play a vital role in that mission and goal as you are reading this chapter. A plan of what needs to be done with those constituents would be the first thing to do before you do anything with software. We could call that plan a Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) strategy. For many non-profit, advocacy, government, and membership-based organizations, CiviCRM is the best tool to support you in achieving your goals and to ultimately help you in your mission.
Does your organization lack a unified and integrated system for managing contacts? Do you spend your energy simply trying to keep track of who your constituents are, without ever understanding how they have interacted, and will continue to interact, with your organization? These are common issues for non-profit organizations, be they large or small, centralized or distributed, more or less organized. Can you answer yes to any of the questions below?
At the heart of any constituent relationship strategy and the tools that support it is the need to manage contact records. Yet CiviCRM is much more than just a contact management system. As an integrated online system that handles contacts, donations, pledge commitments, event registration, bulk e-mail, case management, grant distribution, campaign tracking, survey collection, and other functions, CiviCRM provides the tools required to dig deeper, and collect more, from your constituents. And with a proven track record, consistently receiving top ratings from non-profit technology user surveys, you can rely on this toolset to help you deliver results.
By referring to a CRM strategy, we intentionally seek to include the broader management and mission goals along with the technology solution. Tools alone are not enough to achieve success. There must be organization-wide support, and a holistic viewpoint, to manage constituents effectively. Furthermore, the implementation of any tool must begin with an analysis of needs and objectives. We need to have a clear vision of what we are seeking to do and where improvements should be made, before we pick up the tool and start working with it.
A successful CRM strategy can help your organization in many concrete ways. Here are some examples:
CiviCRM can help in all these areas, providing the building blocks and tools for constructing your constituent strategies.
What is Constituent Relationship Management?
Let's take a step back and begin by better understanding what is meant by Constituent Relationship Management. Constituent Relationship Management is the set of processes and supporting technologies used to initiate and improve relationships with constituents. It's important to realize that CRM is not just a technology that is brought into your organization. Managing relationships with constituents involves all of the workflows, processes, and reporting that your organization uses to get things done, achieve your mission, and realize your vision.
Constituent Relationship Management is the non-profit equivalent of Customer Relationship Management in the business world. By comparing and contrasting these two concepts, we will understand the purpose and scope of this book (and the CiviCRM software) better.
Customer Relationship Management versus Constituent Relationship Management
In the business world, Customer Relationship Management systems are used to optimize a company's sales by focusing its resources on those who are likely to buy. They are also used to improve customer satisfaction and lower costs by providing self-service options. In most cases, businesses are looking to sell more by reaching new customers or expanding business with existing customers.
In order to do this properly, CRM systems track, automate, and personalize all aspects of client interactions across all communication channels, including website, phone, in-store, e-mail, and social media such as Twitter, forums, and blogs. Every time a customer touches the organization in any way, the interaction is logged. This information is used to better understand the relationship with the client, to ensure that all interactions are designed to maximize the long-term profitability of the client to the business, and to attract new customers. Typically, Customer Relationship Management systems focus on tracking and enhancing customer interactions in the marketing and sales funnel workflow for new and returning customers, and later improving after-sales support. Depending on the industry and the company, CRM systems and techniques might also be used for tracking and enhancing relationships with other stakeholders, such as regulators, shareholders, or media.
The ideas developed for Customer Relationship Management systems in the business world have been adapted to the needs of the non-profit world in Constituent Relationship Management systems. While increased donations may parallel higher business sales, there are generally differences in terminology and processes. For example, good Constituent Relationship Management systems are designed to account for pledges, recurring donations, soft credit donations, and the portion of ticket or product prices eligible for political or charitable tax receipts.
More importantly, Constituent Relationship Management will go far beyond mere financial goals and measurements. Most non-profits measure success in non-financial ways, such as the following:
These organizations will have critical non-monetary measures of success beyond increased revenue and lower costs. They may include metrics based around education, service, advocacy, participation, case resolution, or other outcomes relevant to non-profit missions. Consequently, tools for managing constituents must go wider and deeper than financial metrics alone.
Despite these differences, Constituent Relationship Management systems are still fundamentally similar to Customer Relationship Management systems as they aim to support the growth in numbers and depth of engagement of contacts with an organization.
In the business world, one way this is done is by keeping existing customers happy, in order to avoid the high costs of new client acquisition. Similar strategies and techniques apply in the non-profit world, given the generally higher cost of acquiring new donors, activists, volunteers, or members, as compared to retaining existing ones.
Another good strategy in business is to aim to increase the volume of business received from existing clients. For example, you might identify one-time purchasers or low-end customers and seek to communicate the value of more expensive products (up-selling), or why they would want additional related products (cross-selling). It may also be achieved by focusing on increasing repeated business from customers who return more frequently for the same product (for example, to watch movies more frequently).
Non-profit organizations benefit from this same strategy, both in fundraising and in non-monetary appeals. For example, fundraisers typically aim to increase the recency (that is, how recently each donor has donated), frequency, and monetary value of gifts from their donors.
For non-monetary contributions, non-profit organizations generally measure constituent activity and communication. For example, they may seek to increase the actions of existing organization activists, such as appeals sent, educational programs attended, or shut-ins voluntarily visited. They also benefit by encouraging constituents to undertake actions that require more co-operation with the organization, or result in more impact, such as calling a radio call-in show to support a legislative position, in addition to signing a petition, visiting their elected representative as well as sending him or her a letter, and so on.
Increasing the number and depth of interactions can often involve targeting clients with shared characteristics, such as those who have made several recent low-cost purchases, or small donations for a special treatment such as an offer, a special ask, or other follow-up communication.
Another objective may be to ensure that those best suited for a product or service receive such a great experience interacting with your organization that they recommend it to others.
In the for-profit sector, this may involve sales personnel or systems using the purchase history of an individual or a company to respond strategically by offering appropriate discounts, cross-selling or up-selling suggestions, and so on. For example, a long-term customer might be offered a discount when he shows up at a website, a computer buyer might be offered small items at checkout time, including games for a previously purchased game system, or a client who has made premium purchases might get a more expensive range of products. After-sales support personnel would be provided with the whole record of attempts an individual might have made to resolve a problem, as this often helps narrow down an issue and avoid irritating requests to repeat actions. A complete customer record might show that an individual with a tough problem is considering a major purchase, or that they have had a history of making unauthorized technical changes to the product that might have impaired its functionality and voided its warranty.
In the non-profit world, parallel examples would include the following:
Similarly, technical support has parallels in non-profit case management. Imagine how much a non-profit serving at-risk youths could benefit from being able to easily pull up the records of someone calling in about depression, when those records reveal a caller has a history of suicide attempts? The extent to which you can capture, and later retrieve, such data for a constituent may significantly impact your ability to serve them effectively.
In all of the preceding business and non-profit examples, a tiny organization with a single staff person, serving a small constituent base, would be challenged to recognize the individual, remember the history of interactions with them, and act appropriately by providing a discount. More difficult challenges would include calling up someone who had stopped coming in, going the extra distance for someone who needs it, or curtailing resources dedicated to a relationship not related to the mission of the organization. Technology helps to scale these appropriate behaviors to situations where many staff members and volunteers have been involved in the interactions with the client or customer. It can help in situations where some of the staff members or volunteers may not have the best memory, and may not have the best judgment as to how to respond to the situation. The proper tools also help your organization retain institutional history through the inevitable staff turnover.
Who are your constituents?
We've made an assumption so far that you have a clear concept of your constituents, but it is worth taking the time to define this clearly for your organization. A constituent is any person, household, or organization that has some relationship with your organization. Depending on your organization, they may include the following:
In some cases, your relationship with one constituent may need to be through another. For example, a parent might be the constituent who signs up their child for a program, or a staff person might be the contact person for the organization they work for.
Which constituents your organization needs to focus on—individual donors, volunteers, granting agencies, newsletter subscribers—depends on your mission and situation. It's usually good to keep in mind that one person often has many hats and may fall into several categories of constituents. It's also a worthwhile exercise to periodically brainstorm your list of constituent types. There may be audiences you've not effectively reached because they have fallen out of your peripheral vision — and yet may in fact be very valuable to your cause.
It's often most effective to gather information about a relationship when the constituent can understand why it is needed. For example, explaining that a mailing address is needed to provide a charitable tax receipt when a donation is being made, asking about food preferences only when someone is purchasing tickets for dinner, or requesting policy interests when signing up for a newsletter helps reduce the burden in any particular interaction, and makes for a more natural deepening of the relationship.
While designing your CRM strategy, you will need to balance the benefits of having information about your constituents with the costs of acquiring, maintaining, and using it. As you develop your strategy, you should ensure that it focuses on gathering data that will help your organization act effectively, and know that it is acting effectively, in the constituent relationships that are most important to achieving its mission. These are often the constituents with the most transactional encounters with your organization—donors, volunteers, members, event participants, and so on. However, sometimes, a small number of constituents can provide a breakout value—a game-changing, qualitative improvement. For example, investing in some research and wooing a few key media contacts, potential coalition partners, or swing legislators, may help your organization realize its mission more than great gains in number and efficiency at other levels.
When is CiviCRM the best CRM?
So far, we have discussed CRMs generically, comparing how they are used in the business world with the non-profit sector. There are many options available for implementing a CRM, which prompts the question—when is CiviCRM the best CRM for your situation?
Perhaps more than any other factor, what sets CiviCRM apart from other CRM solutions is that it was built from the ground up with non-profits in mind. While other products exist that are geared toward the non-profit audience, many are either a modified version of a product originally built for commercial sales, or target a very focused slice of the non-profit world, such as soliciting donations or managing members. Very few other options provide as complete and robust a solution, tailored to the common workflows and terminology of non-profits.
For organizations managing contact records, but needing to track both monetary and non-financial interactions, CiviCRM provides a powerful set of tools. These uses may include the following:
If your organization requires functionality in a couple of these areas, then it is very likely that you would benefit from CiviCRM. CiviCRM's integration with Joomla!, Drupal, and WordPress (popular open source content management systems that are excellent for running your website) also distinguishes it from a number of competing CRMs. By integrating directly with your website, information collected from your constituents will immediately be part of your contact database. Furthermore, you can expose real-time data to site visitors, or logged-in users, through searchable directories and self-service profile forms.
That said, we want to acknowledge upfront that CiviCRM isn't the right tool for every non-profit to manage its constituent relationships. There is no perfect one size fits all solution. Depending on your needs and resources, you may find CiviCRM unable to meet the unique demands and workflows of your organization. This section provides some general guidelines for situations where you might want to consider an alternative to CiviCRM.
As a low-end cut-off, your organization needs to have resources to set up, host, and maintain CiviCRM, either by paying a hosting provider and consultants, or by using internal staff resources. Tiny community groups with no budget or IT resources will not be able to afford these costs even though CiviCRM itself is free open source software without any upfront or ongoing license fees. While the public-facing pages are easy to use, administering CiviCRM does require a certain amount of tech-savviness. You may be constructing searches, setting up templates that will be merged with contact data for e-mail blasts, deciding on the fields to put in forms, and performing other similar activities. More advanced skills are necessary for some initial setup tasks such as configuring e-commerce connections to payment processors and designing how to store information among fields representing contacts and their contributions, participation in events, memberships, relations with other contacts, and so on. Not all organizations have these skills available internally, or can afford to outsource for them.
Thinking through alternatives
If your organization is small and your needs are focused on a particular task, it might be better to use a single-purpose tool, whether free, purchased, or available through paid subscriptions. Best-of-breed single-purpose tools can provide superior usability, desirable flexibility, lower cost, lower administrative burden, and higher-end features for that particular functionality.
For example, Google, Yahoo!, and other providers of free group e-mail list and discussion software is one example. EventBrite is one example, in the event management area, where the narrow task of managing event registrations may be accomplished more easily. There are a multitude of applications that can help you with bulk mailing, organizing and managing events, and memberships.
You will find that many single-purpose tools have started to expand functionality into other areas, but are primarily focused on one area. If your needs align in one of those focused areas, the limitations may not be problematic and the solution more appropriate.
Where each of these single-purpose tools may be very strong in one area and weak (or completely absent) in other areas, CiviCRM is generally very solid, if not exceptional, in all. It's CiviCRM's superior capabilities across the many diverse functionality areas needed by non-profit, advocacy, and membership-based organizations that sets it above competitors with even moderate CRM functionality.
Too often, many organizations find that they start using one of these targeted services to meet one need, and then adopt a second for a requirement in a different area, and soon end up with multiple data silos— systems that won't talk to each other, or require complex data-syncing protocols. Migrating to CiviCRM at that point is common, but the additional hassle of the migration and change in tools and procedures can be avoided by choosing CiviCRM from the start.
Customizing CiviCRM to match your needs
A different type of problem confronts organizations that have significant and well-defined needs that are not met by CiviCRM out of the box, even if it is functionally pretty rich. In these cases, the decision is often between building an in-house application from scratch, or customizing an application such as CiviCRM to do the job. CiviCRM as the basis for a custom solution makes sense in a number of situations. (See the Chapter 11, Interacting with Constituents – Managing Cases for more information and background.) These include the following:
Before continuing, let's pause to note one of the most significant aspects of CiviCRM that sets it apart from many of its competitors. Unlike most commercial CRM solutions, the CiviCRM software itself is free and open source. By open source, we mean the code (written primarily in PHP) is freely available and may be modified and customized to whatever extent you need.
When we discuss using CiviCRM as the base of a custom solution, we are suggesting that CiviCRM's out-of-the-box functionality may meet a certain threshold of your needs, and through custom development, you can tailor it to fully meet your needs.
There are still scenarios when using CiviCRM as a base for your custom solution doesn't make sense. If you find the base-level functionality only minimally meets your organization's needs, it is likely worth looking for a more complete solution to start from.
The advantages of building functionality into a full-fledged CRM also sometimes need to be balanced against the cost of extending CiviCRM. Significant changes or additions may require a significant investment of time and resources.
CiviCRM is built using PHP, Smarty templates, jQuery and pure JavaScript, and connects to a MySQL database. The variety of libraries and technologies, and the sheer size of the code base, have presented barriers for some developers hoping to modify or extend the core software that the CiviCRM team distributes and maintains. Even for experienced developers, there is a learning curve to understanding how the code is constructed and how various libraries are implemented. That requires a certain investment of time for your in-house developers as they acquire a knowledge base of the software. Of course, the CiviCRM community doesn't leave developers to wander in the dark without assistance. There are online resources for developers, an IRC chat channel, a CiviCRM Stack Exchange forum, additional support forums, and periodic developer training events.
Depending on the nature of your custom requirements, and the extent to which they are of potential value to the broader CiviCRM community, you may find it easier to extend CiviCRM through native CiviCRM extensions, Drupal modules, Joomla! plugins, or WordPress plugins. We will discuss the tools available through third-party extensions throughout this book, and touch on some of the underlying developer tools that make many aspects of customization quite easy in the last chapter. For now, understand that many customizations may be accomplished using extensions without the need to radically alter or expand the core software.
CiviCRM is an open source project that is quite responsive to community needs and contributions to address areas it does not currently cover. Indeed, the project generally extends its functionality by working closely with organizations that can sponsor new functionality or contribute new features back. Instead of hacking the core just for your own implementation, you can improve the core code so that it handles your own needs and those of others with similar needs.
If you search the CiviCRM wiki (http://wiki.civicrm.org) and forums (http://forum.civicrm.org), and communicate with the core team and the community via the forums, or the CiviCRM Stack Exchange site, you may find that there are others who are interested in the same functionality, and may be able to contribute something to having it built. Even if your needs are unique, there may be ways to generalize them so that they can be met with software that addresses the needs of others at the same time.
One successful way organizations began collaborating to build new functionality into CiviCRM is through Make It Happen (MIH) initiatives. Started in August 2010, MIH initiatives have helped aggregate support from many users and consultants for several new pieces of functionality. The program works when one organization defines specifications for a project and works with the core team to refine the specs and determine the budget required. The organization must seed the sponsorship and can then invite other organizations to donate to the project. Once fully funded, the core team will begin work and incorporate the functionality into the core software for all to benefit from. The MIH program has proven a successful way to crowd-source specific improvements to the software.
Alternatively, your forum post or question on CiviCRM Stack Exchange may result in suggestions for simple or ingenious workarounds that can suffice in addressing an oddity in your requirements that was holding your organization back from going with CiviCRM. In this way, you learn from other organization's users how to use the software in more creative ways without requiring code customizations.
While the burden of maintaining your own code in sync with changes in the core is significant, well-resourced organizations sometimes find that it makes more sense to develop custom versions of open source software containing features that are not shared back with the community. Usually, this is because the needs are quite unique, such as integrating with a custom in-house legacy application.
Other CRMs
When deciding on a CRM tool, there are many existing CRM offerings that could be considered. The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN; http://NTEN.org) conducts periodic surveys of technology use in the non-profit sector and publishes the results. Though they are heavily focused on North American non-profits, they provide a good indication of CRM market penetration and user satisfaction, with common solutions in this very large and influential region.
CiviCRM, Salesforce, and Convio are the three most used systems in the most recent surveys. Other providers or tools widely used, or acceptably rated, in these surveys include Antharia, Blackbaud, SugarCRM, Kintera Sphere, DemocracyInAction, and Organizer's Database. Although the cost and functionality is significantly different, Microsoft Dynamics CRM is another notable CRM in the larger non-profit sector, while Salsa sometimes crosses over from its focus on small and medium-sized businesses.
Needs will vary from one organization that uses a CRM to another. For example, Salesforce has tended to do better with large organizations (those with greater than $3M budget), as has Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge. As you evaluate a CRM tool for your organization, you should take into account the current and expected needs of your organization, as well as the current and anticipated functionality in possible CRMs. In other words, to the extent you are able, try to get a sense of where the CRM development is headed, and who is the core audience they are seeking to cater to. Given this caveat, the next section will outline common reasons for adopting CiviCRM over the other alternatives.
Why CiviCRM?
Every organization should do its own evaluation of CRM options using criteria appropriate to their particular needs, weighing each suitably to provide the right overall balance. This section summarizes some of the reasons why CiviCRM is right for many non-profit, advocacy, government, and member-based organizations.
Focused on needs of non-profits
More than anything else, what sets CiviCRM apart from other competing programs is that it is designed specifically to meet the needs of non-profits, and provides a well-integrated platform that addresses all their basic needs. This avoids or alleviates the complexities, problems, time, and expenses associated with running separate systems for things such as donations, e-mailing, events, and membership, or trying to programmatically integrate them.
CiviCRM is well suited to the needs of many kinds and sizes of organizations:
Many CRMs are built around common workflows in for-profit businesses that don't always map well into the non-profit world. The sales funnel model, and terminology underlying sales force automation, for example, may not map well to the activities in an awareness-raising campaign. Substituting some terms, and adding some non-profit specific tools, as Convio Common Ground does with Salesforce, doesn't always overcome the issues with the underlying model.
User satisfaction
NTEN's 2007 CRM Satisfaction Survey determined the following:
The three systems that were most commonly used by all organizations—CiviCRM, Salesforce, and Convio—were ranked first, second, and sixth, respectively, in willingness to recommend.
NTEN's 2009 Data Ecosystem Survey reinforced this result by finding that the overall happiness of organizations was similar, with grades of B+, B, and B- going to the top three tools: CiviCRM, Salesforce, and Convio, respectively.
No vendor lock-in
A significant problem with many proprietary CRMs is the difficulty organizations face in moving to a different vendor. As a free and open source software system, CiviCRM places no restrictions on the ability to export and migrate your data. It resides in a MySQL database which may be accessed through your hosting provider at any time. That ability, to directly access and work with your data for customizations, advanced database queries, data migration, and so on, is often quite important. Most significantly, it guarantees that you, the organization, owns your data.
Some proprietary systems are only offered by a single vendor. Service outages, poor help response times, or unhelpful technical support responses, may leave your organization with no option but to switch to a different CRM just to deal with vendor issues. By contrast, the growing pool of integrators, trainers, and consultants for CiviCRM (https://civicrm.org/experts) enables organizations to shift from one provider to another without having to change CRMs.
Unlike with some proprietary systems, there is no vendor lock-in with CiviCRM.
Integration with Drupal, Joomla!, and WordPress
Drupal, Joomla!, and WordPress are the big three most commonly used Content Management Systems (CMSes) in the world. CiviCRM integrates with all three systems. This is important because it allows your CRM to easily present public-facing forms and listings on your website. Easy configuration of donation and event signup forms, and self-serve functionality for membership signup and renewals, are incredibly important to many organizations. By centralizing your database and integrating directly with your website, you remove or reduce data entry and data syncing between different systems.
If you are building a new website while implementing CiviCRM, you will need to spend some time comparing the features and tools available in each of the three CMSes to determine which is best for your organization. At a very high level, Drupal is the best in terms of providing a robust rapid application development environment, for programming highly customized sites, using numerous user-contributed modules that integrate well with each other. WordPress, by contrast, tends to earn top scores for usability for administrators. Joomla! tends to be in the middle. But such evaluations are hotly contested, benefit from being more fine-grained, and need to be updated through evaluations of the latest versions. In many ways, the three have converged significantly in terms of the tools and experience they provide. There are less distinct strengths and advantages of one over the other than there used to be. You should evaluate each against your particular needs using third-party reviews.
One factor to consider when comparing options is to research the types of third-party extensions available that may be specific to a certain CMS. For example, you may find the organic group integration module that is available for Drupal to be a persuasive argument for working with that CMS. The webform, views, and workflow integrations for Drupal developers are particularly strong. Or you may need to have membership-based authentication rules that are only available through the Joomla! CiviAuthenticate plugin. Then again, the shortcodes feature that is unique in Wordpress might be the deciding factor in your choice.
Each CMS has a growing list of extensions available, most of which are listed in the CiviCRM extension directory (https://civicrm.org/extensions).
In recent versions of CiviCRM, significant work has been done to expand the capabilities of CiviCRM's native extension-handling tools. A native CiviCRM extension installs and operates similar to how a Drupal module, or Joomla!/WordPress plugin works, but it is CMS-agnostic — it will work in any of the three CMS environments.
In any case, CiviCRM lets you take advantage of a powerful open source content management system, integrating your contact database directly into your organization's website.
Total cost
The common saying that free and open source software is free like kittens rather than free like beer applies to CiviCRM. The total cost of ownership of a software system is an important metric for deciding which is more appropriate. Open source software costs for a system such as CiviCRM are different from those of proprietary systems. The absence of an upfront purchase cost is not the end of the story. The costs of maintaining the system over its whole life need to be calculated. Instead of one-time purchase costs, or annual or monthly software license costs, there are likely to be additional expenditures on installation, training, and support. As you use the system, and your needs begin to change, you will likely have costs to customize and adjust things. And as new versions of CiviCRM are released, you should anticipate ongoing costs to upgrade the software. Depending on an organization's CRM needs, number of CRM users, and staff competencies, CiviCRM may be more or less expensive than the other alternatives. Support (upgrading, maintaining, and customizing) of a software tool such as CiviCRM can be done by your own staff or volunteers, if the knowledge is available; you can work with a developer or CiviCRM partner, which might be expensive in one way, but save you time when users need to work with the system; or you can get a support contract with a partner or an SaaS CiviCRM offering, which then gives you a flat monthly cost. What is important is to consider these costs when examining your CRM options so that you can meaningfully compare your proposed solutions.
Dynamic open source development
The free in free and open source software is primarily the freedom to modify the software to meet one's needs (see http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Developing+with+the+CiviCRM+team). This is certainly an advantage for many organizations with resources that are unable to get proprietary systems adapted as they require, or that are unwilling to let another organization drive the feature development roadmap and time frame of their enterprise CRM system.
CiviCRM has a strong, growing, international open source community and software ecosystem. CiviCRM averaged over 8,300 downloads per month in 2013. There have been over 500,000 installations since version 2.0, with around 3,600 known active CiviCRM installations in the winter of 2014. Total downloads per month tend to vary significantly from month to month, with jumps reflecting windows of time when new versions are released. But, over the course of the project, there has been a steady increase in usage, based on these download stats. If you're interested in viewing more recent stats in an interactive view, visit the newly released statistics portal: https://stats.civicrm.org/.
In addition to Make It Happen contributions, CiviCRM receives a large number of contributions from the community in the form of code patches for new features, including the following:
The number of issues reported and patches submitted by the community has increased significantly over the years. But along with the reporting has come increased contributions from the community to help provide patches and new functionality.
This has grown further since the migration of core code to GitHub (https://github.com/civicrm). Git provides a distributed version control system model, which encourages code contributions from the community through pull-requests. While the bulk of the contributions are made by the core development team, an increasing number of contributions come from members of the community.
