CiviCRM

Introduction

CiviCRM is a Customer Relationship Management system that works with our web software which we use to provide membership management. It can only be accessed by logging in to our web site and you web site userid has to have been assigned a role that provides permission to access the information held within it. It can provide quite a lot of functionality although we are using just enough to handle our membership and events. It is accessed by clicking the CiviCRM link in the toolbar near the top of pages. That will show the CiviCRM dashboard and a a set of links to access the features within it.

So lets look at some of the components.

Contacts

The starting point is the Contacts which consist of three types

• Individual
• Household
• Organisation

These each have sets of fields associated with them such as name, address, telephone number, email address etc. Individuals have more fields than the other two. The fields reflect the many ways CiviCRM may be used and we just use those that we need and don't fill in the rest. We follow GDPR and only save the personal information required to handle membership. We have also added some of our own fields to handle the volunteering options that we have on our membership forms.

The data that we have in Contacts has been sourced from the computer file originally used to produce mailing labels for the Antiquarian and then used for emailing it. It is thus a subset of the information on the paper forms, in particular it has initials rather then forenames. These have been updated for some based upon personal knowledge or from the email address. This needs to be updated from the paper forms. Family membership is also rather deficient as the form does not provide for much differentiation between family members. So all family members have been marked as volunteering for activities when it may just be one of the household members. It also seems that the volunteer information is based on the original membership form and not on renewals and thus does not match what was last declared. This is quite understandable as it would be major task to update this every year. 

Contacts do not just have to be for members but all people and organisations we may contact. We have some stewards who are not actually LHG members and we can also use this to handle exhibitors.

Tags

There is the facility to define Tags which can be associated with Contacts and these can be used within Groups to select those with that tag. So for example we could use this to note who had keys to the Centre and have a Report to see who these people are.

Groups

We can define groups of contacts.

• Plain groups - Contacts are individually selected and added to the groups
• smart groups - Selection criteria are specified which ar used to choose the contacs when the group is used. For example we have one to choose active members with an email address and another for those without one. Then one for all the active Heritage Centre volunteers. These make it easy to easily contact people who meet a specific criteria.

Searching

The two main ways of searching are via the Search tab which has quite a range of options or via the left most item in the toolbar. You can configure that to specify which field you normally want to search in, e.g. Surname and then you just type part of the name and it gives you a list of hits to select from.

Membership

Membership is linked to contacts. Our Family membership is linked to Household and Corporate to Organisation, the rest linked to Individual. Memberships also have fields such as Type, Join date, Renewal date, Contributions made.

To add a new individual membership we need to first create the Contact record for them, then add a Membership to that, then add the Contribution. It is then done and we can get it to send them an email. I'm hoping to add a more simplified process in the future especially as Family memberships are rather more complicated. We don't create a Household contact for Individuals. For Family memberships first create the Household contact and add the membership and Contribution to that. Then create Individual Contacts for each family member and add a Relationship to the Household contact. For one of them also a Head of Household Relationship as well.

Contributions

Contributions is the part that records when membership has been paid and it can also be used for donations or payments for events. This is where we can set up online payments processors such as Stripe

Events

We are using Events to provide details of exhibitions and social meetings which provide a feed into an event calendar. We also use it to specify when the Windmill and Lifeboat House are open. We could also use it for online booking of event attendance. We have a list of events in the normal web pages but we need to provide more information by creating CiviCRM Events as well so we can provide more detail and have them appear in the Events calendar.

We've got some templates set up which provides a basic skeleton for them and that makes it easy to set them up for single day events such as social meetings. For Heritage Centre events it needs to be set up as multiple events, one for each day, so we can add in the times of 10-4. So we create create a single event for the first day starting at 10 and finishing at 4 and then ask it to repeat it every day, omitting Mondays, till the final date. Adding in more to the skeleton describing the event and the exhibitors makes it much more useful for prospective visitors.

Mailings

Mailings are used to send out emails to Groups of Contacts. This will be used to send out the Antiquarian to members. We have some standard footers and headers and can define our own email templates. This makes it very easy to contact members with good looking emails as our standard header includes our logo. For those who don't have email we use the Search interface for example to select members without an email address via Groups. From that list we can ask it to produce a set of labels in a pdf selecting a template mating our label format. This is used to print the labels required.

Mailings are sent from a special email address mailer@lythamheritage.uk. Our normal one of thecentre@lythamheritage.co.uk is treated as spam by some ISPs which can make it hard for recipients to see them, but more importantly the mailer address is a special mailbox which CiviCRM is configured to periodically read and if any bounce replies are sent it marks the email address in the relevant Contact. This handles email addresses that are no longer valid or which have been entered incorrectly.

Reports

There are quite a few reports available, the majority being fairly generic. The ones with name starting LHG are ones created to help suit our needs. These are most easily seen via the CiviCRM dashboard. Click Available Dashlets to see a list and drag and drop the ones you want to see further down the page. Clicking the Full Screen icon makes them easier to read. Our Volunteer reports are to help manage them and for that the options have been enhanced from just Yes/No with Active and Retired as further options. This helps to see who may be available to help with those tasks. The volunteer co-ordinators will need to update the Individual Contact records to make this useful. Once we have a valid set of Active volunteers we can these use Mailings to easily contact them.

Membership numbers

There is nothing within the system to create and show membership numbers. They aren't needed to use and manage the system as we can search by Name, Email etc. The nearest thing that could be used is the Contact Id as each Contact has a unique number. It does have drawbacks though as it is a number assigned by the system and not something we could change. Adding a new Family membership needs multiple contacts adding so using this number as a membership number would mean that it is not a single increment when a new Family is added.