Your nonprofit doesn't have just one fundraising strategy. You have many. Think events, donor letters and appeals, e-newsletter blasts, planned giving, and capital campaigns. Each of these strategies typically targets a specific segment of your community, even if the funds raised impact the same budget line.
Your CRM system should make it easy to tie together and understand the effectiveness of your efforts. Fortunately, if you are using CiviCRM you get that functionality out-of-the-box with CiviCampaign. With CiviCampaign you can tie together events, mailings, activities, and contributions under one umbrella, or campaign.
Every dollar you raise, no matter how (offline gift manually entered, online event registration, major gift, corporate sponsorship) can be tied back to the same goal. You can easily use these campaigns as a filter in Advanced Search or your Reports. You can also take immediate action, such as emailing all individuals who have contributed towards a...
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Are you responsible for planning, managing and monitoring campaigns for your organisation? If yes, you are probably using CiviCampaign to link contributions and campaigns and analyse their success. However, unless your campaign requirements are rather simple, I bet that you encountered some limitations of CiviCRM's campaign functions such as:
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no function to record costs involved with a campaign action or to track the campaign's budget
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no campaign hierarchy
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limited reporting options
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not much of an UI to manage and or visualise...
The ability to create petitions in CiviCRM was a tremendous move forward for people using CiviCRM for political organizing. The petitions feature took another step forward with the Petition Email extension, that allows copies of your petition to be automatically sent by email to a given target. However, the holy grail of e-advocacy was still just out of reach: automatically sending your petition to the petition signer's elected official.
Now, CiviCRM will have it.
The Progressive Technology Project is putting our final touches on a ground-up re-write of the Petition Email extension that will allow the target to be chosen dynamically based on the information provided by the petition signer. You can still specify one or more people to receive a copy of all petitions signed. However, with the re-write, you will also be able to specify a group of contacts that will...
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With the 4.3 upgrade, the Progressive Technology Project has made a number of important steps toward breaking out our work into pieces that others can use on their sites. This blog will begin a series of (hopefully) weekly blogs outlining new functionality that others can use.
Our first blog features the civicrm_petition_email Drupal module. Thanks to the hard work of agh1, a Drupal 6 version of the module is available (https://github.com/agh1/civicrm_petition_email). We just finished porting it to Drupal 7.
For the impatient:
git clone git://git.progressivetech.org/powerbase/civicrm_petition_email
git checkout 7.x-1.x
With this module enabled, there are a few new checkboxes on the petition form that allow you to specify the name and email address of a target that should get notified every time the petition is filled out. In addition, you can optionally specify a field in the petition...
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Hi,
The code sprint in London has finished yesterday. It's always a pleasure to see old civi friends and meet new ones. Thanks to Michael and Katy to have organized it. Time for a quick update of what I've been working on with the most obscure title I could find. My focus has been on usuability to make civicrm easier and faster to use.
To make our crm more user friendly, we need to make the pages more "application like", where you can add, edit remove and reorder from the same page without having to switch and go to more pages with forms to fill and save. And load. And wait. And save, and load and wait more...
For instance -and that will be a make it happen that we launch next week to improve- creating a survey today means you have to go to visit a different page to create the survey, the profile, for each field you add in the profile, for each custom field you need to...
Read moreThe CiviMobile web app is now underway and being developed with the jQuery Mobile framework (HTML 5).
The app is Based on the prototype that Xavier and Kyle created, and is beginning to take shape, the functionality in place at the moment includes contact/activity search, add contact and view list of events. It’s intended to be used by an organisation’s staff, as a tool for them to use on the move.
During the EU code sprint next week my focus will be on getting phase 1 completed and giving a demo to some potential funders. Checkout the wiki for the full spec. Once its ready I will be looking for some volunteers in the London area who'd like to do some user testing at my university within their interaction lab, which involves cool eye-tracking equipment!
We are also going to use phase 2 of development to test out a new PHP framework:...
Read moreIn doing some research for a potential project, I was exploring what kinds of eAdvocacy options were available to plug in to CiviCRM. Many of the big commercial eAdvocacy tools have big commercial price tags to go with them (and don't integrate directly with CiviCRM besides).
In an older thread on CiviCRM, mbriney describes the problem:
"The problem is not in building a solution... it's maintaining it. Most of the congressional offices utilize a web form as the only method of sending email. These forms often change, are replaced with new code, new systems, the member redesigns their site, someone new comes in, there are many reasons why this changes. What the big advocacy firms do is monitor these sites for those changes and...
New Features in Version 2
Handling multiple contacts and contact types
Instead of processing a single contact per form submission, you can now have as many contacts on the form as you like, and they don't all have to be individuals. A simple use for this would be to allow a person to fill out their own...
Texting - sending short messages via sms to cell phones is a powerful but untapped tool for community organizing. Recent Pew Internet studies have shown that young people of color use texting far more than other demographic groups, and increasingly access the internet and communicate solely through their mobile devices. Given this, texting has tremendous potential to help community organizing groups in the US communicate with their members.
Attempts to incorporate SMS in the past have stagnated (http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviSMS) A few important things have changed since then: the use of texting has gone up dramatically, particularly in the United States and the emergence of SMS application framework providers has made it easy and affordable to both send and receive sms messages.
While there are still some cost and opt-in barriers that need to be addressed, PTP believes that part...
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