CiviCRM: CMS Integration Example

I discovered CiviCRM this past Tuesday at The Social Impact Meetup at CSI [The Centre for Social Innnovation]. What makes CiviCRM compelling is that it is a complete Customer Relationship Management system integrated well with some of the most popular CMS software – Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.

CMS systems have taken off in the past 10 years with 34% of the World’s websites being powered by either Drupal, Joomla or WordPress. In the last 3 years all of the CMS systems have worked to expand their connectivity to major software systems as part of  their SaaS offerings.

For example, WordPress as the most popular CMS with 50% marketshare has added REST API capabilities to the existing Ajax API  and XMLRPC connectivity options. Now more Integrators are offering WordPress-based SaaS solutions.

This trend is of particular interest to Governments, NGOs, and Civic Organizations where there is the need to foster connectivity and system support to their constituents. These organizations are looking to link  various Open Source software with their WordPress or other CMS systems.

Open Source CiviCRM turns out to be a most telling example of this type of integration. CiviCRM’s provides a basic core set of services for an NGO such as  contacts, relationships, activities, groups of constituents , activity tags and roles/permissions for its members. Administration  components help keep track of contributors (CiviContribute), events (CiviEvent), member lists (CiviMember), cases (CiviCase), grants (CiviGrant), campaigns (CiviCampaign), petitions (CiviPetition),  various mailing campaigns(CiviMail) .  The CiviReports and associated dashboards allow an organization management team to keep abreast of all the key performance areas within the organization.

Whats In the WordPress CiviCRM

First it is important to note that CiviCRM has extensive documentation of its core services along with an excellent guide to integration with WordPress:

Now CiviCRM provides interfaces for two major users – Constituents or Clients and Managers/Administrators. The following Accordion shows the how CiviCRM serves these two groups.

The Lineup of CiviCRM Features

Admin Operations Dashboard

This dashbaord provides overview of the CIVICRM System

Managers can check the status of Constituent, Events, Campaigns , etc.

Contacts Setup - Student Entry Form

CiviCRM allows for 3 default Contact types – Student, Parent, Staff. Here is the Contact form creation screen:

There are basic customizations allowed for CiviCRM forms.

Membership Operations Form

Membership can be filled in centrally by Staff:

Again the fields used can be customized.  and their are numerous aids to data entry including Date pickers and dropdown option selectors.

Client Membership Entry Form

The members entry form can also be done online with credit crad data entry using any of 15 pay processor tools including Paypal. There is extensive documentation on payments. This makes sense because Contributions and Campaigns provide alternative donation collection routines in CiviCRM.

Contributions Administration

CiviCRM provides extensive support for donation contributions on a variety of plans with constiuents. Here is so asmaple set of option settings:
As you can see just like with other WordPress PageBuilders, CiviCRM allow users to create contribution pages with the full WP Visual Editor with a variety of shortcodes at the users disposal. In addition those same shortcodes can be used with WordPress Pagebuilder like Elementor, Themify Builder or Visual Composer.

Mailng Campaigns

CiviCRM supports a wide range of mailing options for operational  donation and event campaigns. This is truly feature rich matching mail Chimp and other mail house approaches. Here is a look at the basic offerings:
And again,CiviCRM provides a complete set of documentation on the mailing options.

Events Sponsorship

What really distinguishes CiviCRM is its support for a variety of donation methods. The support for Events is quite complete so an organization can rollout on the website a complete event without having to resort to Eventbrite or other 3rdpart event promoters:
There is a complete set of reports for tracking an event. This is first class support for events like campaigns.

Pledge/Donation Tracker

This is one of several summary reports on the status of Pledge Campaigns and other Donations. So operational donation reporting is well supported in CiviCRM.

Custom Reporting

CiviCRM has a bettery of predefined reports as seen here:
But add to these predefined reports the ability to use such plugins as TablePress or WPDataTables to produce a variety of  additional reports. This is the payoff for WordPress integration – the huge 45,000+ plugins library inevitably has 2-3 relevant  ones for use with CiviCRM.

Documentation and Support

A  danger in using Open Source systems is that the documentation to some OS systems can be of mixed caliber. Not so in the case of CivicCRM which takes a 4 pronged approach to support and document its system. First there is a great introductory landing page that describes the key features and benefits. Second, CiviCRM has a great set of online demos which show off various standalone features and another set demo-ing ech of the CMS integrations. Third, the documentation is not only thorough but also available in French as well. Fourth, CiviCRM has a Find an Expert service which highlights organizations that are contributors, partners and sponsors to CiviCRM and can offer consulting services.

Summary