Blog posts by ErikHommel

Great to read all the feedback from CiviCon Denver and the sprint in the blogs and on social media. It confirms that CiviCon is THE conference where users, developers, supporters and fans of CiviCRM meet each other, share knowledge and swap stories. It is the best spot to get inspired and gain insights into the possibilities of CiviCRM!

During January and February MAF Norge and Jaap and me from CiviCooP have done the first CiviRules sprint, funded by MAF Norge. Our ambitions where:

(My name, but blog is actually from MAF Norge's Steinar Sødal)

How to track what marketing effort is most efficient for recruiting donors or members?

All NGOs would dream, hope and maybe pray to expand their database of donors with new ones. Hopefully your NGO is doing more than just dreaming, but actually spending some money trying to recruit new donors or members.

This week Jaap and me were working on the first CiviRules sprint, funded by MAF Norge. As you have problably read (and if not you should :-) in Jaap's earlier blog post he has been working on API's to send Emails, SMS and PDF letters. In the meantime I have created a first database scheme for CiviRules, hacked some basic DAO's and BAO's together and started working on the first forms. Preview of the screen included :-)

We have just created an extension for MAF Norge that produces an XML file for the tax authorities with the deductible amount for the year for each donor. With a little configuration customization (detailed in the documentation on GitHub) it can be used by any Norwegian organization that has to produce this file every year. MAF Norge is currently testing the extension.

In 2014 MAF Norge funded CiviCooP developing the TriggerAction extension (https://github.com/CiviCooP/org.civicoop.triggers) to assist them with automated Donor Journeys in CiviCRM.

My name is Erik Hommel, 51 years old. I live in the Netherlands in a small village called Brummen(between Apeldoorn and Arnhem) with my wife Floor, our 2 youngest children and four Siamese cats. Our 2 oldest kids have either left home or are in the process of doing so. My working career in ICT started in 1988 as an RPG programmer on the IBM S/38.

Last year we worked together with MAF Norway on the TriggerAction extension to help them with their fundraising donor journeys. They were able to find some initial funding so we developed like mad for a week to be able to start. The TriggerAction extension was a result of that hard work, and MAF Norway presented this at the London CiviCon on 25th September 2014.

CiviCooP just received it's yearly bookkeeping report and as it turns out there is still some money left after all CiviCooP participants got paid for their work and our costs (marketing, website, CiviCRM partnership, community, administration) are paid. So we decided to donate the rest (roughly about 2000 euro) to the CiviCRM community. Speaking to Michael McAndrew and Dave Greenberg we will contribute to the Continuous Integration project, which is pretty technical so hard to fund.

I have just finished the development of a new extension for PUM (http://www.pum.nl - thank you!!) to be able to add a coordinator (with start and end date) to a tag. I have added the extension to the extension directory (https://civicrm.org/extensions/enhanced-tags).