At Ginkgo Street Labs, we’re on a mission to improve CiviCRM to better meet users’ growing and changing needs. We have many ways that we gather data on those needs, most recently through the CiviVolunteer Survey, in which we asked how organizations are managing their volunteer programs. To encourage participation in the survey, we raffled four $25 Amazon gift certificates. The CiviCRM community is international, so it was not surprising that our winners were from around the globe--Marilyn with Cool Davis in California, Diego with DotPro from Brazil, Lars with Wildsight in Canada and Ahmed with Hidayah Foundation in Qatar. Although their organizational missions vary greatly--environmental issues, women’s empowerment, technology and community organizing--all have a great need to utilize volunteers to achieve their mission.

We tailored our survey to find out what tools and processes are being used to manage volunteers, from data collection, to communications management, to scheduling--and what challenges organizations face in managing them. Below we share the questions we asked and the takeaways from the responses we received.

How would you rate the impact of volunteers in achieving your organization’s mission?

One of the major challenges organizations face, when it comes to volunteer management, has to do with their access to management tools. In the survey, we learned that 79% of the survey participants believe volunteers are essential to achieving their mission, but they don't have effective CRM tools to manage volunteers.

What tool(s) do you currently use to manage all aspects of your volunteer program?

Most organizations rely on multiple tools, as well as specific individuals who ‘know it all’, to manage their volunteer program. Although 65% of respondents use CiviCRM (and 28% also reported using CiviVolunteer), almost all still use spreadsheets and other types of tools. The results indicated that there may be a feature gap and a knowledge gap in how to use CiviCRM and CiviVolunteer for volunteer management.

What are the biggest challenges you face with your volunteer program? Technical or process-wise.

The key challenges our respondents face in managing volunteers are scheduling, communications and reporting. Recruiting volunteers and gathering information about them were also cited. CiviVolunteer is already built to manage scheduling, communications, and some kinds of reporting. In future releases, we plan to build capacity for recruiting and gathering information about volunteers and well as expand the reporting capabilities.

Do you have a program that requires scheduling volunteers or staff for shifts?

Based on the feedback we received, most organizations would like to be able to schedule volunteers and staff for shifts.

Do you have a tool for scheduling? Briefly describe it.

Answers to this question varied widely, with many reporting that they use Excel spreadsheets in addition to CiviCRM. Only a handful of respondents actually use CiviVolunteer to schedule volunteers, and several of those reported that they are having difficulty figuring out how to use it. Other volunteer management tools that they reported using included CERVIS and Salesforce for Volunteers. Additionally, many use complementary tools for specific tasks, such as MRBS and Doodle poll for setting up meetings, and Google Calendar, VSP and signupgenius.com for scheduling.

Do you collect information about what types of activities interest your volunteers?

Over 70% of respondents do collect this type of information. Collecting information is important to establishing and maintaining strong relationships with your volunteers. It helps your organization tailor requests and duties that align with volunteers’ unique interests and skills.

Do you have a volunteer training program or other prerequisites for volunteering?

We saw approximately a 50-50 split on this question, with only two more organizations reporting that they did have a training program or prerequisites for volunteering.

What kind of communications do you have with volunteers? Check all that apply.

The overwhelming majority of respondents are using ad hoc emails and phone calls to communicate with volunteers. Scheduled emails to individuals are also utilized frequently, but scheduled emails to groups of volunteers not as much.

Analyzing the results of this survey has helped us better understand what technology needs organizations have to manage volunteers. It is important to highlight that we found many respondents are not successfully using CiviVolunteer to its full capacity. One of the key benefits of CiviVolunteer is that it not only helps organizations to manage volunteers, but it also integrates with other components of CiviCRM, including CiviMail and CiviEvents. At Ginkgo Street Labs, we are committed to helping users learn how to better utilize CiviCRM and CiviVolunteer, and we invite you to join our upcoming webinar on January 29 on CiviVolunteer: Tips & Tricks.

Many of the improvements that survey respondents would like to see are already planned out in our CiviVolunteer Road Map, and will be included in the next round of development. Ginkgo Street Labs is fundraising to make this development happen in 2015. Please support ourMake It Happen campaign to bring new volunteer management capability to the CiviVolunteer platform. If you have additional feedback, or would like to talk more about the survey results, drop us a line at inquire@gingkostreet.com.

This week Jaap and me were working on the first CiviRules sprint, funded by MAF Norge. As you have problably read (and if not you should :-) in Jaap's earlier blog post he has been working on API's to send Emails, SMS and PDF letters. In the meantime I have created a first database scheme for CiviRules, hacked some basic DAO's and BAO's together and started working on the first forms. Preview of the screen included :-)

In the beginning of February Steinar and Helen from MAF will come and work with us for some days. The next CiviRules sprint is planned for March 2015 and will be funded by MAF Norge, CiviCooP and Amnesty International Flanders. We also hope that Parvez joins us during this sprint.

If you want to know more about CiviRules give me, Jaap or MAF Norge a shout!

During January and February MAF Norge and Jaap and me from CiviCooP have done the first CiviRules sprint, funded by MAF Norge. Our ambitions where:

1. tie up some of the loose ends in the current Trigger extension that MAF Norge uses now
2. start with the CiviRules UI
3. have a first draft of the basic engine for CiviRules.

Jaap did the first part with the Email/SMS and PDF API (see blogpost https://civicrm.org/blogs/jaapjansma/e-mail-send-sms-send-and-pdf-create-api-extensions) and I made a start with the second. Last week Steinar and Helen from MAF Norge joined us and we can now also present you a first draft of the CiviRules Engine! Have a look at our wiki: http://redmine.civicoop.org/projects/civirules/wiki for the basic outline and let us know what you think!

We are planning for a second sprint in March 2015 (funded by MAF Norge, Ilja de Coster and CiviCooP) in the week of 9 March. We hope Parvez from Veda Consulting and Georges from Amnesty International Vlaanderen will join us too. The ambition is to start with the engine development. Anyone that wants to join too is very welcome! If you do, please contact us before 20 Feb so we can make the right logistic preparations.

Our hope is to have a third sprint in June/July but we do need some additional funding for that. If the development of CiviRules excites you and you would love to see it become available in the CiviCRM ecosystem, consider contributing and contact us!

As a follow up to the CiviVolunteer Tips & Tricks webinar, we are scheduling a Ask the Experts Q&A Chat where we can dive into your questions about how to use CiviVolunteer to manage volunteer activities.

Frank J. Gómez, Principal and Developer of Ginkgo Street Labs, will answer your questions related to CiviVolunteer, including what you can do with CiviVolunteer, how you can work around limitations of CiviVolunteer, and how CiviVolunteer integrates with other CiviCRM features. If you have questions or for more information, email inquire@ginkgostreet.com.

Date: Thurs., Feb. 26
Time: 4-5 pm EST
Cost: Free (Registration is required and space is limited, so please sign up early to reserve a spot.)
Click here to register.

Working as a community, we can create something more powerful and benefit more people than we can working in silos. CiviVolunteer was born from the needs and generosity of a few. Today we invite you to become a CiviVolunteer Champion by funding the new features and improvements that you care about the most. A gracious and anonymous donor is providing a matching grant to the CiviCRM project, and Ginkgo Street Labs has been entrusted to use that grant to continue our development of CiviVolunteer. However, we need your help to take advantage of this. Help us raise $15,000 by March 31st, so the community doesn't miss this opportunity.

Why Invest in CiviVolunteer?

It’s simple! We understand what a critical role volunteers play in nonprofit organizations. We started by allowing organizations to manage volunteers for events. Now it’s time to expand. We have gotten feedback from many of you, and some of your ideas are listed below. Help us bring these ideas to fruition. Investing in open source gives you a voice in determining the direction of the tools you rely on. Improving CiviVolunteer will enable many organizations to bring their volunteer management operations in-house, adding another facet to the 360-degree view of constituent engagement that CiviCRM provides.

Help Shape CiviVolunteer 2.0

As a CiviVolunteer Champion, you can shape the evolution of CiviVolunteer by telling us which features are most important to you. Here is a list of ten features we’ve heard a lot of buzz about. Which ones would you like to see implemented? If there are features your organization needs, but you don’t see them on the list, we invite you to share a description of other features you need.

Top Ten Most Requested Features

1. Create a Volunteer Dashboard

Organizations use volunteers in many different capacities. The first releases of CiviVolunteer have focused on managing volunteers within the context of events. The Volunteer dashboard will make it easier to manage volunteers in different scenarios (e.g., office volunteers or ongoing projects). The volunteer dashboard will give CiviVolunteer a home outside of CiviEvent, providing an overview of all volunteer projects and facilitating reporting and overall program management.

2. Enable Volunteers to Self-Report Hours

This feature will provide volunteers an interface for logging their own hours and, depending on an organization’s configuration, submit them to a volunteer manager for approval.

3. Associate Prerequisites with a Volunteer Need

Need to make sure the person filling the 3 pm to 5 pm lifeguard shift has a current CPR certification? With this feature you will be able to specify which prerequisites or qualifications a volunteer needs to meet before she can sign up for a shift.

4. Recurring Volunteer Shifts and Support for volunteer settings in Event Templates

Organizations that use volunteers for longer-term projects will be interested in setting up recurring volunteer shifts. Organizations that host similar events frequently will be interested in having the ability to save CiviVolunteer settings along with their event templates.

5. Public-Facing Display of all Volunteer Opportunities In Your Organization

You have people who are ready to volunteer, but how do you make it easy for them to find out how they can get involved? With this feature, you can list all your volunteer opportunities on one page, so people can easily browse open positions.

6. Improve the Volunteer Sign Up Page

Enable your volunteers to easily sign up for multiple shifts. This feature will allow volunteers see all the shifts at once and to choose as many as they wish.

7. Provide Descriptions for Specific Volunteer Roles

This feature will make it easy for people to understand how different volunteer roles vary, and decide on which role fits them the best.

8. Reward Volunteers & Offer Incentives

Allow volunteer coordinators to incentivize their teams with rewards. In some organizations, volunteer hours can be used as a sort of currency. For example, in community media groups, sometimes there is a direct link between hours volunteered and access to resources (e.g., 4 hours of volunteer time earns 1 hour equipment rental).

9. Adding Locations to Shift Designations

Have multiple locations where you need volunteers? With this feature, you will be able to create schedules and shifts for specific locations.

10. General Project Resources to Improve CiviVolunteer

In order to improve CiviVolunteer, we need to write unit tests, provide documentation, and upgrade the architecture along with other tasks.

Ready to Pitch In? What’s Next?

It’s easy! First, select the features that you would like to see in the next release. We have a list of suggested features, but you can also suggest additional features. There is more discussion of potential features on the wiki. Second, decide how much you can invest in the next release. We will help you determine how far your investment will go. We encourage you to contact us by emailing roshani@ginkgostreet.com or calling 1-888-223-6609. We need for you to confirm your pledge by March 23rd since the matching grant deadline is March 31st.

Plan Your Investment in CiviVolunteer

Ask yourself, how much will these feature further your mission? While the CiviCRM community at large will benefit from your generous contribution, we don't encourage you to view this as a donation. We will create a contract for you with itemized deliverables so that your board knows exactly what they are getting. This is collective purchasing, not a donation. To show our appreciation for the upstanding members of the nonprofit tech community who contribute this to this campaign, we will offering the following benefits:

Gold CiviVolunteer Champion

Greater than $5,000 Contribution

1. Shape CiviVolunteer 2.0

Designate how we should put your funds to work.

2. Recognition

For contributors who do not wish to stay anonymous, we will:

• include your logo and link to your site on the CiviVolunteer Extension page on CiviCRM.org, as well as on our website 
• recognize you in blog posts
• recognize you on social media.

3. CiviVolunteer Setup

We will help you to set up CiviVolunteer in order to fit your organization’s needs.

4. CiviVolunteer Support

Having trouble with CiviVolunteer, or have a question about how to configure things just so? Get exclusive access to our support team.

Silver CiviVolunteer Champion

$3,000-$4,999 Contribution

1. Shape CiviVolunteer 2.0

Designate how we should put your funds to work.

2. Recognition

For contributors who do not wish to stay anonymous, we will:

• include your logo and link to your site on the CiviVolunteer Extension page on CiviCRM.org, as well as on our website 
• recognize you in blog posts. 

3. CiviVolunteer Setup

We will help you to set up CiviVolunteer in order to fit your organization’s needs.

Bronze CiviVolunteer Champion

$1,000-$2,999 Contribution

1. Shape CiviVolunteer 2.0

Designate how we should put your funds to work.

2. Recognition

For contributors who do not wish to stay anonymous, we will:

• include your logo and link to your site on the CiviVolunteer Extension page on CiviCRM.org, as well as on our website. 

Compare your fundraising success last year with other CiviCRM users and small- to medium-sized nonprofits.  Third Space Studios have been conducting the Individual Donor Benchmark Survey for three years, helping smaller nonprofits compare their aggregate fundraising information to get a fix on how successful they are raising money from individual donors.

In return, the survey helps small and medium non-profit organizations gain useful insight into their own data, and contrast that with similar size organizations, to enhance their fundraising strategies.

This year, we realized that much of the survey data is already available in CiviCRM in a standardized way, so AGH Strategies wrote a report extension to help CiviCRM users easily gather data for the survey.  The report gives you totals question-by-question to match the survey.

Want to get started?  Just install the Individual Donor Benchmark Survey extension and run the report.

Participating in the survey helps to increase the sample size of the survey.  It helps you see where you stand, and it helps all organizations get a better sense of their progress.  Furthering your success while helping the community is hardly a new concept for CiviCRM users--it’s at the heart of open-source!  We hope you will participate and spread the word.

Some information and goodies for participants from Third Space Studios:

What You Get When You Give: When you submit your nonprofit’s 2014 fundraising data, we’ll provide you with your individual results AND the complete survey results to share. You’ll also receive the official Individual Donor Benchmarks report and infographic, and an invitation to an exclusive webinar for survey participants where we’ll dig into the results.

The 2014 IDB Survey runs March 2 through March 20. Click here to get started today: http://www.thirdspacestudio.com/idbproject/

Participants will also be entered to win one of five prize packs including:

• One year’s subscription to the Grassroots Fundraising Journal
• A book from the Kim Klein Fundraising Series
• Two hours of organizational development consulting from Third Space Studio
• Two hours of communications consulting from BC/DC Ideas

National Recognition: Last year’s Individual Donor Benchmark Report gained national attention being featured by the Stanford Innovation Review, Nonprofit Times and others. Learn more about the 2013 IDB Survey and Report here: http://www.thirdspacestudio.com/idbproject/

Curious about what the result looks like?

• Read the 2013 Individual Donor Benchmark Report.
• View the 2013 Individual Donor Benchmark Infographic at the bottom of this page

The Individual Donor Benchmark Project was made possible by the following partners: Third Space Studio, BC/DC Ideas, Network for Good, NeonCRM, Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training, Little Green Light, AGH Strategies, and Mike Glover.

As we get close to March 31st, we are excited to share that we have raised $9,250 of the $15,000 to get a matching grant to create CiviVolunteer 2.0.  Please consider donating what you can to show your support.  With this matching grant, we will be able to able volunteer management within CiviCRM more robust and powerful.  Here's what some of the contributors are saying about the importance of CiviVolunteer 2.0 to their organizations. Donate now.

Damon Kirkpatrick, Friends of Georgia State Parks & Historic Sites
"One of the most precious things anyone has to give is their time. At Friends of Georgia State Parks, our volunteers are at the core of what we do. They choose to give their time to help us protect and enhance Georgia's state parks. While CiviCRM has met our needs for almost eight years now, there has always been a gaping hole for us regarding one of our most precious assets, our great team of over 6,000 volunteers. We are very happy to be involved in CiviVolunteer and helping it better meet our needs and the needs of other organizations like ours. Version 2.0 will allow us to better track the significant impact our volunteers make everyday and, at the same time, will better enable our volunteer managers to recruit, retain and reward their hard working volunteers. We are very excited to see CiviCRM rounded out with a capable and sophisticated volunteer management system and are delighted to be a small part of the effort."

Nedette Otterbein, Horn Farm Center for Agricultural Education
“Having one integrated cloud-based database, accessible from anywhere, allows our organization, with only three part-time employees and an operating revenue of $150,000, to empower our volunteers to participate in efficient back office management functions and daily organization-to-client communication. This innovation resulted in an unanticipated growth of our volunteer base from 50 to 400 because of the increased and consistent communication. This increased awareness and access resulted in over 6,395 volunteer hours in 2014. As a participant in the CiviVolunteer matching grant, we look forward to developing a seamless way to communicate via email within CiviCRM to each volunteer who signs up for a task in CiviEvent. This would include initial emails confirming the task, follow-up emails and other task related communications that would then show up in their individual profiles as activites.”

Carmen Neely, Harlem Pride
"Volunteer management is an important component of CiviCRM. A tool to help us build and maintain a solid and strong volunteer base for our organization is critical for us. CiviVolunteer gives us hope!"
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Comment below to share how you would like to see CiviVolunteer improved and how it will help your organization.

Ginkgo Street Labs is excited to announce the release of CiviVolunteer 1.4 for CiviCRM 4.5.x and 4.6.x! This release was made possible by funding from Manhattan Neighborhood Network, the country's largest community media center.

New Features at a Glance

• The new skill assessment widget represents levels of ability on a continuum. When a user drags the slider, the current option (e.g., "Master") as well as all options with a lower weight are selected. As a result, a search for volunteers qualified to do "Apprentice"-level work will include volunteers with "Master"-level skills.
• Search for volunteers from the assignment interface. Having a hard time finding a gaffer for the next episode of your public access program? Filter candidates by custom fields or by group membership, and draft the last member of your crew!
• Volunteer commendation. Did someone stand out at the last river cleanup? Now it's easy to recognize their exceptional performance.
• Volunteers can now express interest in volunteering by filling out a customizable form at http://example.org/civicrm/volunteer/join. Unlike the sign-up forms you're accustomed to seeing in CiviVolunteer, this won't associate volunteers with a particular project; it's a general purpose sign-up form.
• Tailor the questions you ask volunteers by specifying the profile to use for each volunteer project's sign up form. Or specify more than one!

Want to Know More?

Check out the Managing Volunteers in CiviCRM session at CiviCon Denver.

Stay tuned! In the next few weeks, we'll have updated user documentation and perhaps a screencast or a webinar.

In honour of CiviCon 2015, iATS Payments excited to announce a new referral program to help spread the word about using the iATS Payments extension for CiviCRM!  

The concept is quite simple.  Refer an organization to iATS Payments and when their account is approved both your organization and theirs will get $100 to spend as you wish!  This could go towards your cause, a special project, cupcakes for the office - or whatever you like!

Follow this link to learn more and to submit the required details to us.  The iATS Payments account coordinators are standing by to help!

iATS Payments is proud to support the CiviCRM community.  If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to iatsmarketing@iatspayments.com.

On last year's CiviCon in London we presented the first stable release of CiviSEPA 1.0 - a fully integrated solution for direct debit payments in the Single Euro Payments Area.

Since then, many organisations have processed millions of euros in donations, membership and participant fees without having to spend a single cent on payment processor or buero fees.

What you will get with the current stable version

In March 2015, based on our client's feedback, we released CiviSEPA 1.1. This version now features an easy configuration UI and lets you manage multiple creditors with individual settings. Furthermore, the Update provides a nice integration with CiviCRM's online contribution and event registration pages, as well as the Little BIC Extension. It also includes many minor improvements and bugfixes.

Please find more information on CiviSEPA on this Wiki-Page: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviSEPA. It is compatible with 4.4. and 4.5 - so far we didn't have the opportunity for extensive 4.6 tests but we don't expect too many issues.

CiviSEPA is also nicely integrated with the extension CiviBanking which offers a very sophisticated framework for importing bank account statements and matching the enclosed payments with contributions and contacts in CiviCRM. 

Start using and supporting CiviSEPA now!

For your basic SEPA requirements, simply download and install the extension from within CiviCRM or from a GitHub release, read the documentation and you should be good to go. Of course, feel free to work on the code yourself or contact us for professional support if you need to adapt or enhance CiviSEPA for your organisation's need.

We have a number of nice features, enhancements and improvements planned for version 1.2 and/or later versions, including:

• Compatibility with 4.6 and 4.7
• UI to import mandates
• filter options for SEPA-groups UI
• manual adaption of mandate reference numbers

Please support us to implement those features, to keep CiviSEPA well maintained and DD payments free! We'd like to encourage you to share your experiences, share your documentation, and share your code modifications! And please understand that we can't do all improvements and bug fixes for free.

So far we've put more than 130 days into the development and testing of CiviSEPA - only about half of that was paid for. If you consider sponsoring a feature or supporting us in any other way, please contact us via GitHub, email or phone (+49 228 96104990).

greetinx

The SYSTOPIA Team

If you have been working with CiviCRM for a while, you will have noticed that certain patterns occur regularly in your data - and thus have to be entered over and over again.

Consider this: 

• The prefix "Mr" corresponds to the gender "male", "Mrs" is usually "female" - you know that, but CiviCRM does not, so you have to make an additional entry

• In languages other than English, you might have the additional hassle of choosing the gender-specific greetings

• You might also have requirements specific to your organisation - e.g. if you are a faith-based organisation that has contacts with more than 30 different combinations of prefix, formal title, addressee and greetings formats.

​​ ​I'm sure you could come up with more examples from your daily work for data patterns that are common to certain contact segments. Wouldn't it be nice if you could define presets and choose from them when creating a new contact to fill in standard data according to these patterns? It would not only save you work, but also provide for compliance with standards in your organisation (as in our faith-based organisation example above). 

When preparing an email newsletter, one part of it that is time consuming is gathering together all the content that is needed. In my experience, virtually all the content already exists elsewhere, such as in the local CMS, in CiviCRM, or on a blog, or some other online source.    So I was thinking how can I make this process easier.  What I did: I created mail merge tokens for CiviCRM that autofill a list of recent blog posts, stories, or any other type or category of CMS content.  So the end-user sees a list of tokens, one for each content type, each term/category, each aggregator feed,  and for each date range. Such as "Content of type 'blog' created in the last 7 days" .  What is particulary powerful about this approach, is that if you are also using a CMS aggregator (such as the aggregator module in Drupal core) then virually any external RSS feed is turned into CMS content, which is now available as a CiviCRM token. (The original blog post about this extension is at: https://civicrm.org/blogs/pogstonesarahgladstone/easier-creation-email-newsletters-content-tokens )

Thanks to community involvement (specifically thanks to https://github.com/jorich-2000), there is a new version of the Content Token extension.  This version now supports Joomla, in addition to Drupal7, Drupal6, and WordPress.

The lastest version of the "Content Token" extension can be downloaded from: https://civicrm.org/extensions/content-tokens

If you like this extension, you will also likely enjoy my other extension: the "Fancy Token" extension which provides tokens for upcoming events, contribution pages, profiles, and WebForms. 

I am looking forward to getting feedback on this.

I am Tahir Ramzan, pursuing Masters in Computer Science at Virtual University of Pakistan. I am working on refunds, partial refunds and partial payments development for CiviCRM. Parvez Saleh and Joe Murray are mentoring this project.

Refunds and Partial Refunds:

Often, we need to tackle situation where one needs to make partial or full refunds. After this project users will be able to make refunds with friendly user interface and proper database records.

Concerns:

• How to represent an administrative fee for refund? Who will pay this, buyer or seller?
• How to link the refund with the original contribution?
• Which method to use for processing refunds?  Check, payment processor or both.

Partial Payments:

Partial payments on the other hand need to be done when someone pays a part of payment contribution in installments. This will be very useful for CiviCRM users for multi-purpose tasks. By developing this project, not only the users of CiviCRM but also the end users will be benefited and CiviCRM contributions will witness a significant increase.

Concerns:

• How to represent an administrative fee for the partial payment? Who will pay this, buyer or seller?
• Pre-defined amount installments and buyer defined installments/ variable amounts
• Handling taxes, penalties, markup and administration fees

Key deliverables:

• Refunds API
• Partial Payments API
• Refunds UI Extension
• Partial Payments UI Extension

Community Feedback:

I am looking for valuable feedback form community which is vital to make this project successful and useful. Here are links to Forum Thread and Wiki Page of the project. Kindly share your thoughts.

This extension facilitates the ability to register different participant roles for an event in CiviCRM. At the moment CiviCRM will default the role used during online registration to the role chosen when setting up the event. So all the participants from online event registration would have same participant role. The work around for achieving multiple participant roles registered for an event would be to do an offline registration for a person and then select the respective role while doing so or on Drupal installations to use Webform.

How is this extension useful?

This extension provides you with a list of participant roles and their event registrations URLs. You could simply copy and send the URL to the desired participants.

Consider an example here:

You have an event called - Spring Summit 2015

Event Type - Conference

Guest Role - Attendee

Guest Listing - Name and Email etc

and this event is for 2 days in London.

Now people registering for this event would only have participant role to be "Attendee" using the "Online Registration (Live)" link.

If you have this extension installed, on Event screen under "Info and Settings" tab, you should be able to see the following (refer the screenshot) at the bottom of the page. Here every url is mapped to its participant role.

So to register volunteers for the above event, you could use urls next to "Volunteer" and so on for other participant roles. It not only generates URLs for the default participant roles but it also does for any custom participant role that you might have. :)

Github: https://github.com/veda-consulting/uk.co.vedaconsulting.multipleparticip...

CiviCRM Extension listing: https://civicrm.org/extensions/event-registration-based-participant-roles

Amnesty International Flanders (AIVL) have been using CiviCRM for a couple of years now, initially with memberships mainly but lately more and more as a fundraising tool. They have implemented CiviBanking for their incoming bank transactions and are now in the process of testing CiviSepa for their direct debits. We (as CiviCooP) are part of their CiviCRM family and work together with them to support their processes in the best way we can, making the most of CiviCRM. Other CiviCRM community members like Xavier Dutoit and Björn Endres (of Systopia Organisationsberatung) also for part of the team with some projects and ongoing development.

AIVL has a large fundraising amibtion, and want to recruit more donors and also improve the effectivity of their recruitment. One of the development areas in this respect is the incoming data flow from street recruitment. Street recruiters go out into the streets of Flanders with their tablets and recruit new donors.

At the moment the time gap between John or Jane Doe signing up in the street and him or her being known in CiviCRM is several weeks. The recruiting company sends an Excel file with the new donors to AIVL once a week. The Excel list is then manually checked by a volunteer, and the donors and their direct debits are manually entered into a number of systems, one of them being CiviCRM. If an error occurs with one of the donors on the list (mandate not correct, data not found or other stuff) the whole list waits for that error to be corrected. As you can imagine this process takes too long and is too cumbersome.

AIVL wants to improve this process using the CiviCRM functionality before they start the big campaigns in September. The ambition is to make sure that they can process a recruitment result every day. The functionality of the street recruitment import extension is the missing link which will now allow CiviSepa (with SDD) and CiviRules (next step - automated donor journeys) to do their job. The ambition in steps:

• have the recruiting organization send a csv file every day, which can contain street recruitment results and result of the welcome call the new donor gets within a week of recruitment.
• process the file in a daily scheduled job:
• create the donor if it is not known, making sure we can recognize the donor with the ID of the recruiting organization
•  create phone, email, address and bank account for the donor
•  create a completed activity for the donor, holding the data from the donor and the direct debit as noted in the street recruitment or welcome call
•  add the donor to the newsletter group if so specified
•  create a membership for the donor if so specified
•  create a follow up call activity if so specified
•  create the SEPA direct debit (recurring contribution)
•  update the donor or the SEPA direct debit at the time of welcome call if the data is different
•  create an activity of the type Import Error whenever we flag something problematic

The amibiton is to get the data in CiviCRM as soon as possible, so we almost always import as long as we can, flagging data issues in the Import Error activity.

Björn Endres and me started developing what is now the (status: in test!) extension be.aivl.streetimport. We knew we had a tight deadline and a specific AIVL set of requirements, but we tried to make it as generic as we could so others would at least be able to jump start with the stuff we created. As it is a specific thing we do not think it is useful to put it on the list of extensions, but everyone is welcome to share and (ab)use.The code can be found at https://github.com/CiviCooP/be.aivl.streetimport

AIVL will be testing this in the coming weeks. In the coming days I will be adding a little technical documentation. I am quite proud of what AIVL, Björn and me created together. It will have a big impact on their ability to process the street recruitment and decrease the amount of manual interventions required!

At the BHA we use a lot of Google Group mailing lists, and of course we manage all our contacts through Civi. This meant plenty of duplication - when the head of a particular section changed, say, we'd have to update it in Civi and then the Google Group. So we asked Veda Consulting to write us an extension that automatically synced the two. The first version is now out and available here:

https://civicrm.org/extensions/google-groups-civicrm-integration

Features

• Syncs the contacts from multiple Civi groups (regular or smart) to specified Google Groups
• Adds a scheduled job to automatically sync once per day
• Adds contacts to the Google Groups silently - people don't get authorisation requests
• Supports multiple domains within a Google Apps system

Setup

You will need a Google Apps for Business / Education / Non-Profit account (the API access isn't allowed with the old free accounts, unfortunately).

In order to grant Civi API access to your groups, you first need to create a project at https://console.developers.google.com/project. Then in 'APIs and auth' -> Credentials, create a new Client ID for 'web application'. It'll create an ID and a secret for you. You'll need to add a Redirect URI of http://<<your domain>>/civicrm/googlegroup/settings?reset=1 (adapted appropriately for your CMS, if necessary).

Install the extension and enter the client ID, the client secret and the domains you want it to use. It'll then go off to Google to authorise itself (this is where the redirect URI is important).

Once that completes, you're all set! To configure the sync, go into Manage Groups and click 'Settings' next to the group you want to sync. You can then choose the appropriate Google Group. Then go to Mailings -> Sync Civi Contacts to Googlegroup to manually run a sync (bear in mind it will overwrite the contents of the Google group with those of the Civi group - see below).

Things to note

• The sync is one way: from Civi to Google Groups. This is because, for our use-case, Civi is our primary source for all contact information and all mailing lists should always match it. So you can't add someone to a Google Group and have them land in Civi - if you manually add someone to the Google Group, they'll get removed in the next sync.
• By default the sync won't include people who are marked as Do Not Email, On Hold, or No Bulk Emails. I think this is best for a public extension, but if you want to remove any of these criteria (we removed No Bulk Emails), go to Form/Sync.php and search for $contact->is_opt_out - then remove it from the if statement.
• This is the first release, so please do report any bugs.

This is saving us a lot of time - hopefully it'll be useful for others too.

There have been a couple of blog posts about the CiviRules extension, and a prototype has been demonstrated at CiviCon NorthWestEurope 2015 in Amsterdam. The extension is now available for download in the CiviCRM extension directory (https://civicrm.org/extensions/civirules)! And obviously a session has been scheduled for CiviCon London 2015!

CiviRules is an extension that aims to enable rule based processing, for example: add contact to group MajorDonors if the donor has contributed more than $500 3 times or more. There are many areas where this extension can be extremely useful. The funding of the extension development was done by MAF Norway, Amnesty International Flanders, Ilja de Coster and CiviCooP. During the development we aimed specifically at fundraising. We have developed the extension as an engine, where developers can quite easily add their own specific Conditions and Actions. More detailed information on what the extension can do and how to enhance the extension can be found here: http://redmine.civicoop.org/projects/civirules/wiki

Please note that the extenions can do powerful things, and also create powerful issues. WIth great power comes great responsibility? The configuring of CiviRules requires sound analytical skills about your processes and automating them. We would recommend organizations to get a CiviCRM partner to assist them at least in the initial configuration and thinking about CiviRules.

This extension is now live at MAF Norway:

At the code sprint after CiviCon Denver, Tyrell Cook and I tackled some much-needed updates to Civi's wysiwyg system. A wysiwyg editor (what you see is what you get) is the mini word processor you use to compose emails, activities, notes, and other rich-text in CiviCRM forms. The old integration was written back in the days when CiviCRM wasn't so flexible (before extensions, or core resources) and aside from letting you pick between two editors, offered no other configuration options (e.g. to decide what buttons would be in the editor's toolbar). Plenty of room for improvement there, here's what we accomplished:

Configurable CKEditor

CKEditor is the most popular wysiwyg for the web and CiviCRM 4.7 now ships with the latest version. Better yet, I've just finished incorporating the new CK Configurator directly in CiviCRM and expanded it to allow selection of plugins and themes as well. It's pretty awesome if I say so myself, and you can take it out for a spin on the CiviCRM demo site. Under Administer -> Customize Data & Screens -> Display Preferences, click on Configure CKEditor and away you go.

TinyMCE in an Extension

Including more than one editor in the main CiviCRM download seemed excessive, so we moved TinyMCE into an extension, which you can download to keep using that editor in 4.7+. But we didn't stop there - the new wysiwyg framework in CiviCRM is totally extensible. Want to integrate a different editor? Just package it in an extension and off you go! (don't forget to share your work on the extensions directory).

No More Drupal/Joomla editor?

Ok, it's true, we got rid of the "Use Drupal/Joomla default editor" option. It was a maintanance headache for the core team and a pain for integrators too. I'm guessing that most reasons for using it had to do with configurability, which we've addressed with the CK Configurator, so maybe there isn't so much need for it anymore.

But that doesn't have to be the final word. If the Drupal or Joomla wysiwyg editor is a "must-have" feature for you, the code we removed could be easily added back into a module/extension. Want to help create or maintain that extension? Give me a shout on irc or email, or leave a comment below, and I'd be happy to help get you started.

During the past year, I've been working with a number of medium and larger organizations using CiviCRM, and have found a few gaps in CiviCRM's CiviContribute functionality, particularly around the management of recurring donors, which are often a really important part of a larger organizations' donor base.

To this end, I'm happy to share a couple of extensions that I've been developing to fill these holes, detailed below.

Feedback and patches welcome, as usual. 

Also a side note -- if you're using our iATS Payments extension, we've just released a new 1.4.0 release, which is CiviCRM 4.6.x compatible.

1. CiviContribute Recur Extra

Until I put together an official release, use this page: https://github.com/adixon/ca.civicrm.contributionrecur which describes what it does in more detail.

The key things it does are:

a. Backport the new recurring contribution reports in 4.6 for earlier civi versions.

b. Add a system job for handling more complex recurring membership functionality.

c. Configure fixed days of the month for recurring contributions (this is really only a starting point of this functionality, and will depend on your payment processor).

d. Add more editable and viewable fields when managing your recurring contribution records (sometimes called the "schedule").

2. CiviContribute Extra https://github.com/adixon/ca.civicrm.contributextra

This extension provides two other useful things that aren't specific to recurring contributions.

a. Administrative use of front end contributions forms. If you find that the backend credit card contribution forms are too complex for your standard administrative data input of credit card donations, for example, then you can use a streamlined form that you create just like your front end forms (or rather, you use a front end form that's been specifically identified for admin use). This is a spin off of a requirment we had for ACH/EFT backend data entry that found another use for phone bank fundraising, to simplify the phone bank volunteer job.

b. Extended contributions report. The idea of this report is that it generates a bookkeeping report total based on a set of filters you define, and a set of headers your report on, and then every other dimension of data is totalled. In other words, an income report summarized by arbitrary fields.

IATS has been a payment processor extension with CiviCRM for quite a while and has been actively developed & supported. If you are using the IATS extension you can say a quiet thank you to Alan, Karin & Stephen & stop reading.

If, however, you have been using IATS since the dark days before it was an extension and never switched over then it's time to make that change to ensure your site stays secure. Use IATS & need to check? Go to administer -> customise data & screens -> manage extensions and look for IATS. If it says installed - refer to the quiet thank you above (or better yet make a quiet donation to CiviCRM :-).

If not it's time to install the IATS extension https://civicrm.org/extensions/iats-payments - Alan has generously offered to provide support anyone making the transition. You can log an issue on the github repo if you need help - https://github.com/iATSPayments/com.iatspayments.civicrm

What if you can't make the switch?

There is a potential insecurity in the old IATS code. It's likely that it can't be exploited in anyway and that, in fact, no-one at all is using that code anyway, since it's not accessible on a normal install. However, we have decided to remove the insecure code from the next 4.4 & 4.6 releases on the basis we shouldn't ship code that may not be secure.

So, make the switch before you upgrade to the latest LTS or 4.6 release when they come out next week