Bill Powell Is Alive [The Den]
{ Three Acres and a Penguin }

CiviCRM is an amazing open-source web-based program that non-profits can use to communicate with their constituents.

I'll have more to say soon, but for now, here are a few first stops in the wealth of documentation.

A few quick PDFs for an overview

• Short Introduction, showing key features
• Examples of sites using CiviCRM, such as Wikipedia
• Printable brochure with main features

Screencasts (videos)

Here's a long list of short tutorial videos. These videos seem to favor the Drupal integration of CiviCRM, but the tasks will work the same way within Joomla.

Live demo sites

• Joomla demo. Use "demo" and "demo" to log in to the demo administrator site, which is where most of the fun is.
• Drupal demo. You'll notice that the Drupal demo is running the latest release, with the latest features. The CiviCRM community seems to prefer Drupal over Joomla, but they're committed to fully supporting both.
• Standalone demo. You can run CiviCRM outside either CMS, but users will need an OpenID.

More documentation

• Current documentation
• A team also recently wrote a free CiviCRM manual, which you can also read as a PDF

Features to note

A growing list. :)

Access keys

Most screens have a small question mark icon at the bottom right labeled Access keys. Click on it to see special hotkeys for that screen.

Import anything you like

You can import a CSV file almost (every?) time you can enter data. You don't need to sort the CSV columns beforehand; a sophisticated screen will help you match up each column in the CSV file to the exact CiviCRM field you choose.

One gotcha: you will need to sort your CSV files beforehand by whether each constituent (donor, contact, whatever you want to call it) is an individual, organization, or household. CiviCRM can only import one of these kinds of constituent at a time, presumably because the field list is so different.

Export

Don't look for an export button those data screens. Exporting is done via reports. When you select CiviReport, you will get a list of reports you can run and tweak. You'll see the results on the screen, but you can also export them to a PDF or a CSV file.

Or use back-door SQL magic

Of course, since CiviCRM stores the data in a MySQL database, you can export anything you want, if you're willing to learn SQL. (You could also import data with SQL, but this is usually best left to a program's frontend. Especially one so sophisticated as CiviCRM.)

Combining with a payment processor.

The one thing you probably don't want CiviCRM to do is actually process your credit card or other payments. Unless you're set up to process these transactions directly with Visa, Mastercard, et. al., you'll want to tie CiviCRM to a payment processor. Many people may think of PayPal, but in fact you have other options.

Authorize.net and batch processing.

For instance, how could you connect CiviCRM to authorize.net? CiviCRM works with authorize.net out-of-the-box; getting donation pages to send donors to authorize.net to actually enter their sensitive info is easy.

But what about batch processing? What if you have a print appeal, and get back a stack of checks and credit card donations to process?

One approach: put it in a spreadsheet first.

One option is to put this data into a spreadsheet first. Then, you can log in to authorize.net and use their tools for a batch upload.

Tools on the top menu, then Upload Transactions on the left menu, then Upload New Transaction File on the main area of the screen.

How you would you then get this into CiviCRM. Well, you could remove the sensitive financial data from the spreadsheet (easy enough to delete those columns). But this might split the workflow -- what if some of these donations don't go through? So you might instead use authorize.net to manage the transactions, and after the transactions clear, use the authorize.net export features to get a CSV file of donations to import into CiviCRM.