Mapping your data¶
Your existing data may be coming from multiple sources, some electronic, some paper-based and some residing in people's memory. "Mapping" refers to the activity of taking existing data that was labeled in a certain way and "slotting" it into a CiviCRM structure. This is a very important step and skipping it may cause undesired consequences in the future. For example, you may not be able to control or report on data the way you expect.
Everyone thinks about data differently, based on experience with another CRM or no CRM at all. For example, "Donation", "Opportunity", and "Contribution" all refer to money given to your organization. CiviCRM was designed to be flexible and adaptable, so you should have no problem finding the proper place for every piece of information relevant to your organization.
Resist the temptation to add custom fields right away. Instead of adding a new field for manually entering membership expiration dates, learn about CiviCRM's membership module that automates membership duration, expiration and renewal reminders. Having multiple fields to collect the same data will cause confusion later. Avoid data duplication by making informed choices up front.
The following sections will introduce you to options CiviCRM provides out of the box with tips along the way for mapping your data. Instead of using "flat" spreadsheets, relationships will tie your data together. Using relationships, you will be able to create a more complete picture of the community that supports your organization.
Basic information about your constituents¶
CiviCRM comes with default fields to store constituent names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, notes and other contact information. Since CiviCRM was designed for non-profits, the mapping of your most basic constituent information should be very easy.
CiviCRM divides constituents into 3 categories (Contact Types) based on who or what they are:
- Individuals: any person your organisation wants to keep a record of
- Organizations: this could be another non-profit, a company, a chapter of your organisation, or a committee. You will generally want to create at least one contact of the Organization type to represent your organization. This is particularly useful when you are configuring memberships
- Households: a family or group of people who share a physical location
Each contact type comes with different fields, according to the different kinds of data you will probably want to track. For example, gender only applies to individuals, not organisations or households, so the gender field is only available for Individual contact types and subtypes.
See Contacts to learn more about built-in CiviCRM basic constituents fields and how to use them.
Information about your constituents that is specific to your organization (basic introduction to Custom Fields)¶
Many organizations collect data specific to their mission or structure. Even though CiviCRM comes with fields to store basic data that all non-profits collect, similarities between non-profits end at a certain point. For example, your organisation may be interested in information about constituent allergies (for individuals) or service area (organizations).
When mapping data into CiviCRM, decide if the information pertains to an individual, organization, or household. Additional information like "service area" only makes sense for Organizations. To find out how you can create custom fields, see the Creating Custom Fields.
Relationships between constituents¶
Relationships capture current and historical information about how two records connect to each other.
You or your colleagues probably know more about your constituents than what has been written down. You may not have previously collected that information because there was no space in your "flat" spreadsheet or you may have collected it as a "mental note" about a given person or organization. The name of their family members, place of employment, and relationship to other constituents in your database can all be captured with a Relationship.
CiviCRM comes with a predefined set of relationship Types including "employer--employee", "parent--child", and "employee--employer". You can create more relationships to describe your organization specific relationships, for example you might define a relationship type of "vicar--church". When you create a new Relationship, you can define when the Relationship began and, if relevant, ends. Previous relationships can still be accessed when they end. For example, you can see where someone used to work even after the relationship has been severed.
The term Household and relationship Types "household member of--head of the household" confuses many new CiviCRM users. It's useful to group individuals who share a common address in one household, so that they only receive one letter. The designation "head of the household" helps organizations know who the letter should address. For example, you want to address the parent and not the child.
To read more about configuring and using relationships, please see the the Relationships chapter in Organising Your Data.
Activities¶
It is important to know how and when constituents engage with your organization. Knowing that someone gives monthly or volunteers frequently and renews her membership yearly suggests that she may respond well to opportunities that strengthen her relationship with your organization. CiviCRM allows you to record interactions such as phone calls, emails, and meetings between staff and constituents. These features help an organization build a lasting memory of its relationships.
CiviCRM calls these kinds of exchanges Activities. They are tightly linked to other CiviCRM modules. When you record contributions, event attendance, membership subscriptions, and emails, CiviCRM will automatically create a related activity in the Contact record. Decide whether your organization needs different activity types in addition to those provide, such as training, review, exam, support etc.
To read more about configuring and using activities, please see the Activites chapter in Organising Your Data.
Webinars, events, performances, and meetings (CiviEvents)¶
CiviCRM helps manage and track any occasion in which you bring community members together at a certain place and time. Webinars, events, performances, and meetings have specific start and end dates and times, meeting places (including online) and reasons for bringing people together. They can be ticketed, RSVP only, or no reservation required. CiviCRM comes with functionality to promote events and record registrations. If you have records of who has participated in past events, you can transfer these valuable records into CiviEvents.
The Event Types field helps you to distinguish between different types of events your organization hosts. This is helpful for evaluating how many people have participated in a similar series of events or whether someone prefers one kind of event over another.
To read more about configuring and using events , please see the Events section later in this book.
Memberships¶
Many organizations offer a structured program in which community members can sign up to receive certain benefits for a pre-defined period of time. Members choose from a variety of dues levels that have associated benefits, generally the more you give the organization the more you get in return. Organizations can also give membership at no price, perhaps as an award. For example, a long-time volunteer might receive a life-time membership to the organization. Common benefits include access to member directories, extra content, discounts, etc. Individuals, families or households, and organizations can all sign up for memberships.
The main difference between membership dues and a donation is that memberships redefine someone's relationship to the organization for a period of time. Organizations often expect that memberships will be renewed from year to year, while a donation is a one-time gift. Organizations need to send an acknowledgement letter, but they have not promised to serve the donor advertised benefits in response to a donation or Contribution in CiviCRM.
Analyze your current membership structure before importing membership records into CiviCRM. Take time to eliminate unused membership levels or simplify the benefits you promise. The only information you really need to transfer for each member is start date, duration, membership dues paid, and type of membership.
Generally speaking, having more than 10-15 membership types may be hard to manage. Sometimes organizations may have many membership types in order to preserve other information about constituents in the membership record. It's recommended to verify first whether or not CiviCRM already has existing data fields related to memberships to keep track of that information before extending membership records.
Some information that you may have recorded as static information before can now be calculated dynamically, and displayed in reports or other fields. For example, CiviCRM can dynamically calculate the number of years a given constituent has been a member based on the "Membership since" date.
To read more about configuring and managing memberships, please see the Memberships section later in this book.
Contributions¶
Contribution in CiviCRM refers to money, goods, or services coming in to your organization. Money is still money whether someone buys an event ticket, signs up for a membership, or any other activity that requires payment. CiviCRM allows you to record all money coming into your organization as a Contribution with different Types to preserve information about where it came from. You will also be able to specify the date the contribution came in, its status (you can record a contribution as pending before the money is deposited to your bank account) and the form it was delivered in (check, cash, etc.).
If you are planning to keep using an external donations system, you may leave transactions there. On the other hand, you may want to transfer to CiviCRM information about past event/webinar registrations because they tell you the history of constituent involvement in your organization. Also consider how far back you want to import the history of contributions. Large contributions should be preserved, but the fact that someone donated 5 dollars 10 years ago may no longer be relevant.
To read more about configuring and using relationships, please see the Contributions section later in this book.
Campaigns¶
Sometimes organizations host a fundraising gala, send an email appeal, and record contributions all to support one goal. E.g., raise $50,000 to support a kids camp. Campaigns are usually time limited and tie together a range of activities and give you a high-level view to compare how people responded to your initiatives.
You can start taking advantage of campaigns if your organization's fundraising initiatives fit well into a unique themes. Some examples of campaigns are year end pledge drives, or project specific fundraisers. Organizations often send several email appeals encouraging donors to support a particular project or fundraiser, such as a 'final notice' and one or more 'countdown' appeals.
Grouping and tagging constituents¶
Development directors, volunteer coordinators, and program managers store a wealth of information in their heads. They often make decisions about who to invite to an event, who should not receive an appeal, and/or who would be perfect for a volunteer opportunity.
Groups and tags can store that kind of information and act as the building blocks for creating email and invitation lists. Groups are useful to identify two or more contacts with something in common, as opposed to relationships which can only capture information about two contacts. Groups can also act as mailing lists. A group of people who subscribe to your newsletter(s) is a good start.
Organizations can have complex communication strategies, in which they send different letters to several subsets of their community. One Individual can be tagged member and volunteer, so that she receives member specific communications as well as volunteer specific communications. Groups are also useful to store issue or program specific communication preferences. For example, consider a group of people who have specifically requested not to receive fundraising appeals. When you go to create an email appeal mailing, you can exclude the group of Individuals who have requested not to receive fundraising appeals.
Try to avoid creating groups based on information that can be stored by other fields in CiviCRM. You don't need a group for individuals who have opted-out of bulk mailings, because that option will be selected on their Contact record. CiviCRM automatically excludes these constituents from any bulk mailing. Likewise, you don't need a group called "donors" because you can run an advanced search to find any Contact record that has a Contribution associated with it, even between any date ranges. Most functions available to groups are also available through the search results screen.
If you want new records that meet a particular criteria to be automatically added to a group, create a Smart Group from any advanced search. For example, you may want to have a Smart Group that calls the Contact record of all members who also donated more then $100 in the past year. When a member makes a new $100 donation after the group has been created, their record will be added to the Smart Group.
Tags are more like keywords that you want to associate with a record. You can easily add or remove tags, but there is no easy way to see the history of changes. Relationships are a much better tool for seeing information history.
Profiles¶
CiviCRM allows you to pull together sets of fields for different purposes, and help you reduce the amount of time staff spends on administrative tasks. These sets of fields are known as profiles.
Profiles are about how your data is edited or displayed to your staff or other groups of users, not how your data is stored.
Where next?¶
In the sections above we've tried to describe how your existing data may be mapped into CiviCRM. We've only touched on basic CiviCRM functionality or "spaces" where your data may fit. To read more about how CiviCRM can work with your data, please see information in this book about specific CiviCRM components: CiviEvent, CiviMember, CiviMail, CiviContribute, CiviCase, CiviCampaign, and CiviGrant.
Each of the above components will help you streamline administrative tasks related to event management, membership, sending communications, receiving contributions and donations, case management, conducting campaigns, administering grants programs, and more.
The sections on Survey, Petition, and CiviEngage (the latter is actually a Drupal module) relate closely to CiviCampaign and their special functionality is described in the respective chapters.
There is also a separate reporting section related specifically to using reports and doing analysis on your data for ongoing evaluation of your work.