CiviCRM Cookbook

There’s a new CiviCRM book out! The CiviCRM Cookbook covers a wide range of CiviCRM core and component topics with practical in depth recipes with accompanying screenshots. The book begins with recipes that help you save time and effort. These are followed by recipes for organizing data better, including working with

profiles. The book covers all aspects of CiviCRM including managing communication with contacts, managing events effectively, and integration with Drupal. There are detailed sections on all components, and a few pointers to get you started developing with CiviCRM.

From the foreword by Dave Greenberg, CiviCRM core team:“This “cookbook” is well suited to bridge the gap between nontechnical end-users and software engineers. Whether you are a volunteer, in-house staff person, or a consultant – I’m confident it will provide you with ideas for using CiviCRM more effectively.”

Read Tony Horrocks, the author's blog post here

Buy the book here

CiviCRM starter kit

The CiviCRM Starter Kit is a Drupal-and-CiviCRM-in-one bundle which makes downloading and installing a fairly standard instance of Drupal and Civi straightforward. It includes a sensible selection of modules and extensions to get you going.

The package can be installed on your choice of hosting, or on dedicated hosts like Pantheon and the documentation and support is good thanks to its champion, Kevin Reynen. Kevin has great vision for making it simpler for small organizations to get started with the powerful engagement tool that is CiviCRM.

John Derry has built a fantastic demo site using CiviCRM Starter Kit with the demo data created during the CiviCRM Install and a just a few additional modules.

See the demo site here

Read more about the starter kit, and a fantastic hosting solution here

User-focused Webinars on Google hangouts

Introduction to CiviCRM Mini-series is a new experiment. We want to provide more forums for new users to meet and learn from other members in the community. The topic for each bi-monthly call will build on the one before it. For example, the next few calls will cover importing your data into CiviCRM, creating mailing lists, and sending your first mailing.

First hangout - Tuesday, July 16th at 9am Pacific
Introduction to CiviCRM Mini-series: Before You Login
Google Hangout link

You've decided to use CiviCRM. Now what? This 45 minute episode will cover what you should (and should not) do before starting to use CiviCRM. Topics will include how to figure out what data you have, what data you actually use, and what information you need to get from your database over time to do your job well. These are not easy questions to answer because every organization is unique. Even though we'll use one organization as an example during the call, we invite you to ask many questions along the way that pertain to your particular situation. Kellie Brownell from Giant Rabbit will be facilitating the discussion. There are only 9 spots available. Please email her right away if you want to join at kbrownell@giantrabbit.com. Please include your name, your organization and one thing you hope to take away from the discussion.

Check out the excellent trailer by Giant Rabbit here

The Fremantle Chamber of Commerce (FCC) champions policies and strategies that improve the business environment in Fremantle (Perth, Western Australia), enhance community prosperity and develop a sustainable mix of business and lifestyle opportunities for Fremantle’s future. They act as an advocate for the business community, a conduit for information and a promoter of Fremantle’s position in the regional landscape. The Chamber currently have over 500 members, ranging from major corporate organizations to small micro-businesses.

FCC required a CRM system to manage their members, events and organizational activities more efficiently. The main challenge, as is often the case when moving to a new system, was importing and cleaning the existing data which existed in different locations such as multiple Excel sheets and Outlook.

It’s really interesting to see how CiviCRM is being used by these types of associations, as well as smaller not-for-profits. As Brian Shaughnessy of Lighthouse Consulting and Design says “CiviCRM provides a robust set of tools for professional, trade, and community associations. Configure the membership options to track fixed period and rolling memberships, build reports to view new, current, and lapsed memberships, while empowering your members to manage their renewals and personal contact data through self-service forms. Coupled with the event registration, case management, and other tools, CiviCRM creates a single, web-based, centralized database for your association's data management needs -- creating system efficiencies, improving the quality of your data, and allowing organization staff to better serve your members!”

Sankhya Consultants were chosen for the CiviCRM implementation. The project was funded by a grant from the Western Australian government as part of a project to train businesses the benefits of CRMs. The benefits of that for the wider community are that the team at Sankhya had to submit a report on the implementation, so we have that unusual and precious thing - measurable success!

One of the most marked improvements from having their new CiviCRM in place was the streamlined efficiency of the event management process. Before Civi, the average time spent on recording each event participant’s attendance, tracking payment, sending reminders, raising invoices etc was around 70 minutes. Since Civi that average time has gone down to 10 minutes. That’s a saving of around 1 hour per contact, per event!

There are lots of other really impressive stats in the report, such as:

• Updating memberships: Before Civi, 5 mins to contact each member individually, for 1,500 members that’s 125 hours every membership renewal cycle. Since Civi, with automated reminders for the entire database, it takes something like 10 mins admin time per cycle. That’s 125 hours saved!!
• Searching for contacts, to find all the contacts that fulfilled a certain criteria (e.g. lived in a certain area): Before Civi this was a manual process of checking through numerous spreadsheets, taking an average of 2 hours. Since being able to search with Civi’s built-in contact search, this takes less than 5 minutes. Time saved - just under 2 hours!

See a report of the outcomes 3 months after the CiviCRM implementation.

Read the entire case study here