CiviSocial - Integrating Social Media with CiviCRM

CiviCRM allow organizations to interact with constituents through emails, phone, SMS etc with the intentions to make this interaction easier, smoother and transparent. Social media is one other way to reach out and interact with people, and currently CiviCRM is not using social media to its full potential.The project aims to introduce social media especially Facebook and Google Plus, as a part of CiviCRM to make it easier for end users to interact with their organizations’ civiCRM and at the same time help the organization to reach a wider set of audience.

I am Siddharth Gupta, a fourth year Computer Science undergraduate student from IIIT Delhi, a Google Summer of Code student for the year 2015. Last year, I worked on Civisualize - A ready to use data visualization framework. I will be working on Social Media Integration and will be mentored by Chris Burgess and Beckett Vester.

I have divided my project into two parts, mainly the one which helps the end user and the one focussing on the benefits to organizations.

Social Media Connect/Login

Everyday millions of social media users register on new web applications using their social media account. This not only saves them from remembering a new password, but also helps them to fill those long registration forms. At the same time, if one looks at it from a developer point of view, the data provided by the social media website is already validated/authenticated adding a new layer of data validation in the system.

CiviCRM has a lot of forms, from Event registration to Fund Raisers, most of the activities on CiviCRM involves users to fill forms. The project aims at providing the user an option to pre-fill the data and at the same time login into the website using social media accounts.

The primary focus of the project is to include Facebook and Google Plus social connect, but the idea is to create a framework so that any social media website can be included.

Events on Social Media

The second part of the project will be to exposing events to Social Media. This will enable users to not only register on events on CiviCRM but also allow them to automatically RSVP to the corresponding Facebook event.

Once the participant RSVP to the event, the event will not only be added to his/her Facebook calendar but he/she will start receiving the updates from the same. For organizations this will increase the viral reach drastically. Also, a new page will be added to CiviCRM which will ask user to invite his/her friends to the event on social media. CiviSocial Extension

As one of the key deliverable we aim to provide an extension which will Facebook and Google Plus API keys (Client IDs and Secrets) from the admin, and add social login buttons along with the forms.

Along with the login buttons, the extension will also add social functionalities to event, by providing the admin to add events Facebook id and the users to RSVP events directly.

Looking for Suggestion and Feedback

We believe that community plays an important role in any project taken by a student and we look forward to your support. Though social media has a lot of power, it is also our responsibility to respect users privacy and act responsibly. We have had discussions regarding what features to include, what to improve in the plan.

Please comment with your feedback and suggestion, you can also checkout the forum post of the project here.