Posted 03.16.2010 by Jack
- NYC has the first group page on CiviCRM.org. It's a pilot, so comments and suggestions are very welcome to make it more useful.
- Case Study: Fred from the Man Up Campaign
- Joomla website
- Use CiviCRM profiles for contact pages to collect information from site visitors, track their inquiries
- Also successfully used Profiles to collect fairly complex applications for a large campaign
- Added tons of custom fields to collect info via profiles, but use standard fields for email addresses, phone numbers, etc so basic info is easily accessible through search results fields and other views of contact summaries
- Custom fields can then be added to different profiles in different arrangements for public display and use; can also be used internally for data entry
- Also set up simple donation interface for the site through Civi - using PayPal, probably going to switch to Authorize.net
- Other folks using PayPal Pro (user does everything right on the site for about $37/mo, better experiences reported than with standard PayPal), Authorize.net (good experiences reported, the more payments you receive the more you can negotiate your per-payment rate down), Intuit and Google Checkout (painful experiences reported for both)
- Peter on CiviMail
- gotta keep your email lists and your emails themselves clean to avoid being blacklisted as spam
- big risk to send mail via shared hosting because you don't know who else is sending crap email/spam from your shared host; better off going with VPS and setting up your own mail server
- Peter went with Google Apps & Gmail to send through CiviMail
- Other hosted options: May First/People Link has a dedicated bulk mail server that members can use to send via CiviMail; CiviSMPT is out there too
- CiviMail includes tracking via click-thru processes to allow reporting on who clicked what when
- CiviMail also tracks opens via a 1px image included in the email; not guaranteed since images aren't always opened by email clients, but can give you some indication of how many folks are opening an email. Good for comparing who opened Email X vs Email Y (percentages, not accurate numbers)
- CiviMail includes handlers for forwarding replies, auto-responders, unsubscribes and resubscribes, opt-outs. CiviMail uses tokens in the emails so that it can tell which user is clicking and unsubscribe that particular user; unsubscribes users from the group you sent the mailing to. Users who click on the unsubscribe link don't need to log into anywhere because of the token.
- Unsubscribed users will be removed from the group, but there will still be an indication that they used to belong to that group so you can tell that they unsubscribed themselves.
- Set up a cron job to run the script that looks for outgoing mail in CiviCRM and sends it; configure it to go every x minutes and send y number of emails per process. You need to know what your server's hourly/daily/size limits.
- reply channels through VERP address - CiviCRM can go through a separate mailbox, pull out replies through the VERP token, track who replied, opted out, etc
- Another cron job is set up for a script checks whatever inbox you set up as the reply channel and processes the emails according to the VERP tokens in the reply-to addresses
- Whether VERP works depends on your mail host/mail system; Google supports VERP, should check whether your host does too.
- you can use a separate email account for the reply channel; you could also have this go to a bogus email account - CiviMail can process all the things on your own mail server that weren't addressed to a real account (only possible if you're running your own mail server)
- VERP will actually process the messages in your selected VERP inboxes.
- There's an experimental script on the wiki that will map response emails to activities for the responding CiviCRM contact
- This stuff is set up through different CiviMail scripts triggered by cron jobs - these are located in the civicrm/bin folder
- Can create mail content on screen (editing HTML directly or using WYSIWYG, though that can wreck the email HTML) or import it from elsewhere; save templates for emails; you can create both HTML and plain text
- You can insert tokens from contacts' info, tokens for opt outs
- CiviMail will block emails that don't include opt-out mechanisms somewhere in the email (header, body, footer)
- CANSPAM regulations require opt out AND full snail mail addresses to be included on emails that are soliciting money! (did not know that!)
- Some folks suggest putting the opt-out link right at the top of the email (e.g. in the header) so users opt out instead of clicking "This is spam."
- CiviMail lets you send test emails to certain groups, schedule mailings or send immediately.
- You can create CiviCRM profiles that allow mail recipients/site visitors to subscribe/unsubscribe themselves from public groups (and create CiviCRM contacts if they're not already in there); adding the checksum value (token provided when creating the email) pulls that contact's information into the profile fields, letting them edit their existing information
- You can look back at scheduled and sent emails, archive them, reuse old emails as templates, view reports