Chapter 5. Collecting, Organizing, and Importing Data

At the end of the day, any CRM solution is only as good as its data. You can have the latest and greatest software tools available, perfectly customized to meet the needs of your organization, but if your data is incomplete, practically nonexistent, or filled with duplicates and inaccurate information, all of those wonderful tools will be useless.

In the previous chapter, we walked through the CiviCRM interface, understanding the different types of records that will be attached to contacts. However, we did not answer the questions of how we collect data, organize it, and import it into the system.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Understanding and creating custom data fields to store data

• Organizing data fields in profiles for the purpose of creating online forms and other tools

• Integrating profile forms with membership forms, event registration, contribution pages, and online petitions

• Updating multiple contact records...

Custom data fields

Out of the box (or more accurately, off the website), CiviCRM has a core set of fields for each type of record that handles the most fundamental and common needs of the system. Within the contact record, they include standard communication fields (phone, e-mail, website, and IM), address fields (street, city, state/province, country, county, and geocode), demographics (gender, birth date, and deceased date), communication preferences (do not mail, do not e-mail, preferred method of communication, and so on) and various additional fields. CiviCRM has a set of fields for each entity in the system, such as Event, Membership, and Contribution.

Whether you are migrating from an existing database or starting from scratch, you will inevitably have additional data you need to store in fields. CiviCRM provides for this need through its custom data tools.

Tip

Custom data is an incredibly powerful way to extend the database to meet the particular needs of your organization. However...

Creating online forms with profiles

Until this point, most of our attention has been spent understanding CiviCRM's administrative interface and customizing/configuring the system to meet your organization's needs. However, the power of CiviCRM isn't fully realized until you begin to collect and expose data to your website.

Tip

If you are using Drupal as your CMS, you can use Drupal Webforms in combination with the Webform CiviCRM Integration extension to expose and collect data on your website rather than use CiviCRM profiles.

It's not uncommon for organizations to have very disjointed systems collecting and maintaining their constituent data. Perhaps you have a central database, such as MS Access, that is used by staff to track your members or donors and is stored on your office network. Several staff people may be maintaining spreadsheets with information relevant to their job functions, and which they need access to while traveling, or away from the office network. Perhaps your current website...

Importing contact and activity data

Profiles provide excellent tools for empowering constituents to work with their own record or to construct simplified data entry forms for your organization staff. However, quite often you are working with a large number of contact records that must be added to your system, which may be too many to efficiently enter manually through a profile form.

It's also very likely that your CiviCRM implementation project will involve some migration of data from an existing legacy system. Even if you're a start-up not-for-profit, you are likely to have some contact records obtained from an external source that will seed your CRM database.

CiviCRM provides some powerful interface tools to import records from CSV, files, or from a record set specified by an SQL query. Even with a very powerful interface, there will be some work to do with your existing data to prepare it for import.

Let's take a moment to review the import interface and then retrace our steps to understand...

Summary

In this chapter, we configured custom datasets/fields and began to understand their many uses and created profiles in order to collect fields for various uses. We also implemented a profile search and edit form, demonstrating the capabilities for exposing CiviCRM data to your website visitors and users. We reviewed the contact and activity import process, helping you migrate data from previous legacy systems to your CiviCRM database and touched on key considerations when migrating from one server to another.

Looking ahead to the next chapter, we will look at communicating more effectively using CiviMail, CiviCRM's broadcast e-mail system, and looking holistically at the tools available for managing your contacts with a view toward communicating better with them.