tamarmeir's blog

The regular fees layout form provides a list of price levels from which a donor or a registrant must select a single option, for example:

• Select the platinum donor option for $1,000 or the gold donor option for $500
• Select the member fee for $50 or the non-member fee for $100

 If your contribution or event page requires a more complex pricing structure, you would need to use a price set instead as they allow you much more flexibility.

Your organization creates a number of custom data sets and profiles.
If multiple users have permissions to create custom data fields in an uncoordinated manner without clear guidelines, redundancies and waste will most likely occur. Redundancies because similar custom fields could be created for identical or closely related information, potentially with different data types, semantics or input formats. 

Any public facing fill-out form can fall victim to nefarious robots looking for a way to gain access to admin-only areas of your system or payment forms that can be used to test stolen credit card numbers. If they take hold of a given form, this can result in the creation of thousands of contact and contribution records. Since these robots are relentless and continuously adapt to new security measures, there is no 100% fool-proof method of stopping them.

A smooth online event registration process will avoid constituent frustration and if your organization offers events with similar configurations (e.g. monthly community dinners), you can streamline the configuration by using Event Templates.

Membership status is normally assigned and updated automatically based on your configured membership status rules, and, as explained in "Data Hygiene: Keep your Membership Data Up to Date", the key to maintaining accurate membership data (or any data for that matter), is to limit the amount of data that needs to be manually keyed into the system.

Membership-based organizations rely on membership revenue for a steady cash flow, so keeping accurate membership records and ensuring a smooth renewal process is vital. The key to maintaining accurate membership data (or any data for that matter), is to limit the amount of data that needs to be manually keyed into the system. When a new membership is created, CiviCRM automatically does the following:

Email is a vital tool to engage and maintain long-term relationships with your constituents.

CiviCRM helps protect your sending reputation in several ways:

• An unsubscribe or opt-out token is required to send any mass email
  If you hide the unsubscribe option, your contacts are more likely to hit the spam button.

Non-profit organizations are under intense financial scrutiny - they must show accountability through the willingness to explain actions to stakeholders, and must be transparent by publishing critical financial data about the organization. These two tasks, however, can become exceedingly difficult if multiple systems are used to track financial information without regular reconciliation. Luckily, CiviCRM has an Accounting Batch feature that allows you to avoid manually re-keying financial data into your accounting software.

In "Data Hygiene: How to Keep Data Clean and Healthy!", we spoke in general terms of the basic steps you need to take to keep your data clean and healthy. In this blog post, we outline 5 simple steps that will keep your contact data squeaky clean!

Your CiviCRM database is the central hub of your nonprofit's fundraising efforts, membership and contact management, event organization and other important ongoing initiatives. Because of its integral role in your organization, your database requires ongoing maintenance to ensure optimum performance. With nonprofit constituent mobility and employee turnover at an all-time high, data can quickly become messy and stale when data entry procedures for the organization are not properly regulated.