Automatiser les tâches

Si vous vous retrouvez à répéter régulièrement les mêmes procédures de gestion dans votre organisation, CiviCRM peut très certainement vous libérer du temps. Automatiser des tâches administratives ou de routine, plus communément appelées processus, est un peu délicat à mettre en place, mais vous fera gagner énormément de temps sur le long term. Pour commencer, soyez conscient que chaque décision de process peut être prise selon un jeu de critères plus ou moins satisfaits. Nous vous aiderons à réfléchir à la définition de ces critères qui pourraient être utilisés par CiviCRM pour réaliser des opérations répétitives. Ensuite, nous devrons rechercher dans le système les informations testées par ces critères, puis indiquer à CiviCRM les actions à réaliser en conséquence.

En voici un exemple :

Objectif: Automatiser les lettres de remerciement pour un don

Questions centrales: Quelles lettres dois-je éditer et quelles informations doivent y apparaitre ? Où puis-je trouver ces informations ? Quelles fonctionnalités de CiviCRM peuvent accomplir cette tâche ?

Stratégie: Créer des champs de fusion personnalisés et utiliser la fonction de création de documents PDF de CiviCRM.

Champs personnalisés: Fund Name, Tag “Works with Organization,” Tax Receipt Pull-Down (No Tax Receipt, Extra Tax Receipt to Soft Credit, Tax Receipt to Hard Credit), Relationship “Known by Organization Staff”

Champs existants: Thank You Letter Sent, Soft Credit

Champs de fusion personnalisés: First Gift Date, Financial Type, Soft Credit Address and Main Contact

Variations en language "Modèle de document":

• Include/Exclude Fund Name - basé sur le fait qu'il s'agisse d'une donation au fonds ou d'une donation générique ;
• Include/Exclude Tax Receipt - basé sur le fait que le don donne droit, ou non, à un reçu fiscal ;
• Include/Exclude Invitation for Sponsorship - basé sur le fait que le donateur est, ou non, un sponsor de l'organisation ;
• Include/Exclude Invitation to Visit Office - basé sur l'adresse du donateur. Si ce dernier est géographiquement proche des locaux de l'organisation, lui envoyer une invitation.

L'objectif indique la tâche de routine que vous souhaitez automatiser. Par exemple, cela peut être :

• M'envoyer un rapport quotidien par courriel des principaux dons faits à l'organisation ;
• Envoyer un rappel par courriel aux personnes inscrites à un événement la veille de ce dernier ;
• Envoyer une notification de renouvellement à toute personne dont l'adhésion est sur le point d'expirer.

CiviCRM a la possibilité de faire tout cela clé en main (pour en savoir plus, vous pouvez vous référer aux chapitres sur les composants CiviCRM concernés). Il est également possible d'automatiser des tâches plus complexes avec un minimum de personnalisation.

Les réponses aux questions centrales demandent de la reflexion et de la recherche.

Answering focus questions will require reflection and research. As an expert in what you do, try to articulate what piece of information helps you realize that this person, donation or organization deserves different treatment. Maybe this individual is personally known by someone at your organization, maybe this donation requests a unique language in their acknowledgment letter, maybe this volunteer only wants to hear about opportunities to support a particular program.

When you make the decision to give someone or something different treatment, do you have to hunt down any additional information? For example, do you have to find a spouse's name or the address of someone's company? Write out what pieces of information you add or what language you change. If you are familiar with writing conditional statements, try explaining your decision making process in the following format:

If the Spouse Name field is not empty, include spouse name in the line address

If last contribution amount is greater than $10,000 and City is within the Zip Code Range 94110 to 94114, include as the last line in the opening paragraph: "It looks like you're in the neighborhood. Would you enjoy stopping by the office to speak more about our work and meet the staff?"

CiviCRM has myriad features that can be used to help you automate simple tasks. Sometimes the hardest part is finding them. The case studies available on civicrm.org can introduce you to how other organizations are using CiviCRM and subsequent chapters in this book describe what features are available and how you can start using them. If you are poking around the CiviCRM interface, the small speech bubbles can also be a great source for more information on the capabilities each field offers. To create a complicated workflow, you will ultimately want to tie several of these features together.

You will most likely have to create custom fields and custom tokens in order to accomplish your goal. Once you have planned what task you want to automate and how, create custom fields from the Administrator Console. Create custom fields carefully. It's always easy to choose a text field, but they can be impossible to use later in reports or searches because everyone enters information differently. It's better to create fields that have pre-defined answers so spelling mistakes are not an issue. CiviCRM along with any computer program is great at executing on the basis of well defined facts. They aren't as good at comparing two facts that look the same, even if the difference is only one letter in a differently spelled word. You might also be tempted to create several Yes/No radio buttons to capture a set of facts that might work better as a drop down menu.

To be a good database manager, you don't have to understand everything about relational databases. It can, however, be helpful to understand your system's underlying structure in order to understand some of the consequences related to that structure.

For example, you might wonder why you can't create a friend relationship between two organizations. The organizations might be partners, but if the database was told to only recognize the relationship type "friend" between two individuals, that constraint on the database will not let you freely use relationship "friend" for organizations. A fix to that relationship definition will fix the problem but people are often tempted to find a workaround for a problem rather then actually fix the problem. We strongly recommend looking into the reasons why something doesn't work for you and addressing the problem at its root instead of applying a "patch".

CiviCRM comes with multiple pre-defined reports that should cover most of your needs, but more complicated searches may require creating custom reports. You may hesitate to hire a professional to create a proper report to search your specific criteria, but if you are currently copying/pasting information to spreadsheets, you may consider this one time expense worthwhile in the long run.

In general, our advice is to have high expectations of your CiviCRM (and other software) and automate as much of your manual work into the system as you can to free yourself from daunting administrative activities that computers can do faster and more accurately.