CiviCRM an introduction

CiviCRM is a powerful web-based, constituent relationship management solution designed for volutary sector and advocacy groups and developed with this audience in mind. It allows you to record and manage information about your various contacts: volunteers, donors, members, activists etc.

In a recent NTEN survey of the data ecosystem or system of tools used to used to manage interaction with donors, volunteers, activists, and supporters, CiviCRM was the only software to lead adoption for any size organization across multiple categories. It also scored highest for overall satisfaction and had the widest range of integrated components. The report says "Organizations using Convio and CiviCRM for donor management were much more likely to use the same software in other areas. [....] Not surprisingly, CiviCRM and Convio users reported relatively high satisfaction with their data ecosystem."

You can download the full NTEN report here.

You can set up and track: Contact Details, Communications, Activities, Relationships and Groups relating to volunteers, activists, donors, employees, clients, vendors, etc. And then keep all your information in one place and manage contacts, fundraising and communications more efficiently than you believed possible. CiviCRM also has several important components that take it beyond a simple contact management system

CiviMEMBER

CiviMember provides flexible membership management for your organization, along with convenient online signup and renewal. You can set up different membership levels and divide these between different parts of your organisation. For example by region. You can then allow people to sign up for the appropriate membership online and add their own details to your system.

CiviEVENT

CiviEvent provides integrated online event registration and management for paid and free events. You can create your own event sigup pages with different levels of participation and track participants. It's easy to add custom fields for special requirements that you may need to offer, such as dietary requirements, disability access, etc. You can then search for participants by event, event type, participant role, etc. Users can export events as iCal files or subscribe to iCal feeds.

CiviCONTRIBUTE

CiviContribute is an online fundraising and donor management component which enables you to track and manage contributions to your organization. These can be donations, membership dues, event fees, etc. You can automatically generate receipts, and track thank-you notes, and import and export contribution data to/from other systems like an accounting package. Past contributions are visible when viewing any contact record.

CiviMAIL

CiviMail is a robust mass-mailing component which allows you to engage your constituents with personalized email shots and newsletters. You can target mailouts to CiviCRM groups and track open rates, click throughs etc.

CiviREPORT

From version 3 onwards CiviCRM has greatly immproved reporting facilities and many common reports are included in the standard distribution. However it is relatively simple to produce any report templates that you may require on a regular basis.

Integration with Drupal

To really take advantage of its power, CiviCRM can be integrated with Drupal so that web site registrations automatically become CiviCRM records and individuals can maintain their own CRM record. Using the two together gives you the tools to connect, communicate and activate your supporters and constituents. With Drupal integration, access to certain groups of contacts can be limited to specific users, offering a way for volunteers to manage small portions of a larger CiviCRM database. You also have acccess to Drupal's powerful Views module which integrates with CiviCRM to provide user with the correct permissions access to additional overviews of the data.

Circle Interactive are experts at CiviCRM implementation and customisation and have been working with this powerful software since 2006 in a variety of organisations large and small. Please contact us to see how we can help you with your project.

Find out more from civicrm.org