• INTRODUCTION
• HOW CAN CIVICRM HELP YOU?
• FEATURES
• INTERNATIONALISATION
• REAL WORLD EXAMPLES
• WHAT IS CIVICRM?
• CIVICRM CONCEPTS
• WHAT IS A CRM?
• WHAT IS A CMS?
• WHAT DOES WEB-BASED MEAN?
• WHO IS CIVICRM?
• IS CIVICRM FOR YOU?
• EVALUATING YOUR NEEDS
• EVALUATING CIVICRM
• ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS
• LETS GO!
• ONE STEP AT A TIME
• THINKING ABOUT YOUR DATA
• INSTALL & CONFIGURE
• CONSTITUENTS AND RELATIONSHIPS
• CONTACTS AND THEIR DATA
• ADDING AND IMPORTING
• GROUPS
• COLLECTING AND SHARING DATA
• SEARCHES
• RAISING MONEY
• FUNDRAISING PLANNING
• MANAGEMENT METHODS
• SEARCHING AND REPORTING
• EVENTS
• CONFIGURATION AND PLANNING
• CREATING AND PROMOTING
• MANAGING PARTICIPANTS
• MEMBERS
• CONFIGURING MEMBERSHIP
• MANAGING MEMBERS
• SIGNUP/RENEWAL PAGES
• SEARCHING AND REPORTING
• COMMUNICATING
• EMAIL COMMUNICATIONS
• POSTAL MAIL COMMUNICATIONS
• CIVICRM COMMUNITY
• FREE SOFTWARE?
• BUG REPORTING
• EXTENDING CIVICRM
• APPENDICES
• GLOSSARY
• ABOUT THIS MANUAL
• CREDITS

Management Methods

This chapter discusses methods for fundraising using CiviCRM and its powerful contribution management component, CiviContribute. Throughout CiviCRM the term "contribution" is used to refer to any financial transaction or payment taking place in the system. This may include a donation, event fee payment, membership dues payment, or other similar transaction. This chapter assumes you have a working understanding of custom fields, contact matching rules, CiviCRM profiles, and the CiviMember and CiviMail components. The chapter also assumes you have already set up your payment processor, configured contribution types, and created any custom fields you want to use when tracking contributions.

Online Fundraising

One of the best parts of CiviCRM is its integration with your site's content management system.  Once integrated with either Drupal or Joomla!, CiviCRM allows you to build an unlimited number of contribution pages that can be seamlessly accessed from your website. Contribution pages can be used to:

• Accept donations and other contributions
  
• Process membership signups and renewals
• Run a specific fundraising campaign

This section will walk through each of those three scenarios and point out some options and features that may be useful for you. Once you answer all the necessary questions and consider all the points mentioned in the chapter, you can build your contribution pages. Step-by-step documentation for doing that is available at http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Manage+Contribution+Pages.

General Online Contribution Page

Before you configure a general contribution page, ask yourself:

• What contribution type will be used to categorize contributions received via this page?
  
• Do you want to allow people to give in honor or in memory of someone?
• What other data do you want to capture from your donors and contributors? These can be pre-defined CiviCRM fields or custom fields that you have created previously. The only field required by CiviCRM to process a contribution is an email address. Typically you will want to collect additional contact information for the contributor. These should be added using a Profile.
  

  Note: Whenever possible build the profile of fields that you will expose on the contribution form before you build your contribution page. A contribution page can include up to two profiles. If you do not create your profile before creating your contribution page, you can complete the process and return at a later time to adjust the configuration settings.
  

• Can individuals contribute on behalf of an organization? This is most commonly used for membership sign-up pages (see below).
  
• Do you want to allow people to pledge a certain amount as they contribute? A pledge is defined as a commitment to give a certain amount over a certain period of time. Pledges are a great way to allow your supporters to provide long-term support to your organization.
  
• What are the amounts you want people to choose from? Some organizations call these "donation levels" and they're important because they give a potential donor a range and suggestions of what to give. You may also allow donors to complete an "other amount" field and ignore your predefined giving levels.
• What text do you want to appear in the following?
• The introduction of the contribution page
• The footer of the contribution page
• The text for the thank-you page
• The automatic email receipt sent to the contributor (optional)
• Do you want to enable the "tell-a-friend" feature? This allows donors to forward the page to friends, which can be very powerful in spreading your message throughout their social networks.
• Do you provide premiums such as t-shirts, tote-bags, etc. to donors if they give a certain amount? If you do, be sure to set-up your premiums within the CiviCRM administration pages first.
  

Once you have answered and resolved all of these questions, you can build your contribution page. Go to CiviContribute and click on Manage Contribution Pages » New Contribution Page. The options and settings should map pretty clearly to the choices you made for the questions listed in this section.

Membership Sign-up Donation Page

CiviContribute is closely integrated with CiviMember, the membership management component of CiviCRM.  This means that your online contribution pages can allow people to join your organization at predefined membership levels.  When people do, they create not only a membership record for themselves but a corresponding contribution record.

Note: You must create all of your membership types and status settings within CiviMember's administration tools before you build your online membership sign-up page.

Before building your membership sign-up page, you need to ask most of the questions listed in the previous section for the contribution page. A couple of additional questions include:

• Should this page be used only for membership sign-up purposes, or can people give general contributions as well? Membership-based organizations usually use their contribution page only for membership sign-up which means they do not allow a variety of contribution amounts and membership sign-up is required.
  
• Which membership types allow sign-ups? Some membership types in your organization may be for administrative use only.
  

If your organization allows organizations as well as individuals to become members, you will need to allow individuals to join on behalf of an organization. Depending on your membership structure you may want to require this behavior.

Campaign Fundraising Page

In addition to the questions in the previous sections about how the contribution page will be used and what information it will capture, CiviCRM includes some exciting features for campaign fundraising purposes:

• The campaign contribution page can have a start and end date along with a goal.  You can then create a widget to embed on your website to show the progress of the campaign toward the goal (see below image).
  
  

• Wouldn't it be great if your constituents could do some of the fundraising for you? CiviCRM has a feature called Personal Campaign Pages (PCPs) that allow you to let people create their own fundraising page for your organization. This means a donor, after donating to your organization, can elect to create a page with her own photo, text, and personal information. She can then send a link to the page to her friends, soliciting support for your organization. This is a great way to widely and quickly spread the message about your campaign. 
  
  When someone donates through a personal campaign page, a soft credit is given to the owner of the page to recognize the role she played in the contribution. CiviContribute has a section that allows you to administer all of the PCPs for your organization as well as moderate PCPs you don't approve of. Lastly, PCPs can have their own "Honor Roll" that highlights donors through that page (donors need to opt in to have their name displayed in the honor roll).
  

Publicizing your campaign

Now that you've created your contribution page, it's time to bring people to the page so they can contribute! Naturally you will display a link to the page prominently on your website through a donate button or menu item. Here are some additional tips for the different CiviCRM versions:

• Joomla!: The most direct way to expose your contribution page or membership signup/renewal page to the front of your website is by creating a menu item. Navigate to a menu and create a new CiviCRM item. From the list of menu options choose Contributions. In the basic parameters section select the contribution page you would like exposed from the dropdown menu. Save the menu item and view the website to confirm the page's functionality.
• Drupal: From the contribution page listing select "Live Page" to view the finished page. You can then copy the url and include it in a content page or assign it to a menu item.
  
• Standalone:  From the contribution page listing select "Live Page" to view the finished page and link to it.

Emailing your current membership is the other critical way to publicize the campaign. The CiviMail component of CiviCRM allows you to send targeted emails to any group of contacts in your database. Within a CiviMail message you can include links to the contribution form and use CiviMail's tracking capability to see how many people click on that link.

One time-tested way to increase contributions is to send each targeted constituent a personalized email with a link to the contribution form that has all of their contact information already filled in. This saves them the hassle of filling it out and raises the chances that they would ultimately donate. Using CiviMail, you can use this feature by creating a special link in the body of your CiviMail message that includes a checksum token. A checksum is a unique and pseudo-random number assigned to each recipient of the mailing that points back to their contact information that is securely stored in your database.

When people click on the special link, CiviCRM looks them up in the database and pre-fills any information on the contribution form (core fields or fields exposed via a profile) with the corresponding data if it exists in their record.  To read more on how to do this and what the link path must be, visit: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Mail-merge+Tokens+for+Contact+Data

Automatic Contribution Recording

Regardless of how donors get to your contribution page, CiviCRM automatically records their donations, freeing your staff from doing manual data entry. If they already exist in the database, CiviCRM adds the contribution to their existing record. If they don't exist, CiviCRM creates a new record for them.

To record contributions in the appropriate records, CiviCRM must identify the donor correctly by comparing the information they enter into the contribution page versus what exists in the database. By default, CiviCRM checks just the contributor's email address. In other words, if Judith Monroe has a contact record in CiviCRM with an email address of judith@example.com and she puts in that email address when she contributes, but with the first name of Judy, the contribution will correctly go into her record. If she puts in another address, such as a Hotmail or Gmail account, a new record will be created and you may have to manually clean it up later. Note that this is only applicable for anonymous users (those not currently logged into your website). Once a user logs into the website, CiviCRM recognizes them in the system and will attribute any activity to their record.

We recommend that you configure CiviCRM to match contact information very strictly by changing the default duplicate matching rules.  In our opinion, it is better to risk creating a new (duplicate) record for someone who is already in the database than to incorrectly credit their donation to someone else since it is not uncommon for multiple people to share an address such as info@example.org  or judyandjim@example.com. We recommend you change the duplicate matching strict rule so that the first name, last name, and email must all match. This raises the bar on whether data is merged with an existing record or a new record is created. Using CiviMail's automatic fill-in feature (checksum token) will help avoid some of these issues. To configure your duplicate matching rules, go to Administer CiviCRM » Find and Merge Duplicate Contacts.

Offline fundraising

Organizations have plenty of offline opportunities to raise money. You may pick up donations at events or solicit donations via postal mailings. For money raised through any of these offline activities, your staff needs to enter the results manually.

There are three steps in offline fundraising: creating your lists, creating your mailings, and manually entering contributions.

Creating your lists

This process is fairly straightforward if you are familiar with CiviCRM's search capabilities.

1. Create a list of records to receive your offline postal mail appeal (this can be your entire database if you like). If you want to later track the success of a mailing or if you are tracking who receives certain appeals, it is recommended you save the search results as a group.  Later on, you can mark everyone in that group as recipients of that appeal using the Record Activity for Contacts option under the More Actions menu.
   
2. From a search (whether a search of the groups' members or of other criteria) you will see a More actions dropdown menu that allows you to, among other things, export the list as a CSV file. Select all records or a subset using the checkboxes, choose export and click Go.
3. As you export to a CSV spreadsheet, you can determine which fields you want to export to your spreadsheet and save the list of exported fields as an export mapping for future use. By default, CiviCRM will export a great deal of data, including contacts' names, contact information, email addresses, and phone numbers, and a list of their groups and tags.

Creating your mailings

Once your spreadsheet is created you can do a mail merge using any popular word processing software (such as OpenOffice.org the Free Software Word Processor) that will insert any fields you want in the letter.

CiviCRM can also create mailing labels for you. Perform the same search you used in the previous section to create your list of recipients, but under the More Actions menu, choose Mailing Labels. Then select the mailing label number, determine whether you want to exclude people with "do not mail" checked in their privacy options (checked by default and recommended), and whether you want to merge two records that have the same mailing address into one label. This last option is very useful when you are mailing a household or organization and you don't want them to receive duplicate mailings. When the records are merged, each name at that address appears on its own line on the label. Once you click 'Make Mailing Labels," a PDF document will be created that you can print off.

Entering contributions

Hopefully your mailing is successful and contributions start pouring in! To manually enter a contribution for a record that is already in your database:

1. Find their record using the contact search tools.
   
2. Select the Contributions tab and click Record Offline Contribution.
   
3. Complete the new contribution form (see below image).

On this form you record the contribution type, amount, received date (the default is the current day), receipt date, and status (the default is Completed). Any custom fields for contributions will also appear on this form. The "Additional Details" section near the bottom offers many other options, including adding a note about the contribution and entering the date when the thank-you letter was sent. The last two drop-down lists cover whether the contribution you are entering was in honor of someone else and whether there is a premium associated with the contribution.

If the donor does not yet exist in the database you will need to manually create their record first. From the CiviCRM home page there are links to create new records called New Individual, New Organization, and New Household. Click on the appropriate link and fill out any information you have for this contact. Once the record is created, follow the same steps as above.

Soft Credits

The Soft Credit To field is a powerful CiviCRM feature. As mentioned earlier, if a donor sets up a personal campaign page (PCP) and their friends and family use it to make donations to your organization, some of the credit goes to the donor who set up the PCP. The person giving the money receives a "hard" credit while the owner of the PCP receives a "soft" credit. When you enter a donation manually on the contributor form shown above, you can assign a soft credit.

Other uses of soft credits which can be managed using this form include credits to spouses, partners, or employers, enabling you to get a sense of how much money is coming from a relationship or providing a credit to employees if they urged their employers to donate.