What part of CiviCRM are you having difficulty with right now?

[Dave Greenberg]

If there are regular tasks in CiviCRM that you (or your clients / users) find difficult, and you have suggestions for how to make them easier - please post your experiences and feedback here. The more specific you can be in describing the issues and potential solutions - the better! Feel free to attach screenshot snippets etc. to help explain things.

We hope to continue improving the usability, and efficiency of CiviCRM in coming releases. You can help by letting us know "what hurts".

[xavier]

The import from another source is quite frankly a pain.

Quite often, the data source isnot  100% correct (eg one country is "US" instead of the needed "USA", or "United state of", or whatever the format you expect). Instead of not importing the contact at all, it should be possible to import as it is (eg with the country empty).

The error reporting makes it even worse (you have to download a csv to find the guilty contacts, with error messages that are not that clear). Why don't you display them on the page ?

In my dream land, I'd like to import, got an error message "X invalid contacts (link to visible list ) , would you import them anyway and correct later ?" if yes, I got the list of problematic one with link to the contact edit so it can be fixed.

Provide predefined mapping for standard formats (hint, outlook

Make it easier to do "split import" (organisation at the same time as the individual contacts (if the organisation exists, add the contact to the organisation, if not, create it and uses the contact infos, like address...)

I'd be great to have a "tainted" flag on the contact, so that's easy to spot contacts that need manual cleanup.

Last, be less anal on the format (eg M=Mr=male=MALE=Male all should work, UK=United kingdom=England=Scotland...), and more clear when you expect an specific one (gender should be Female or Male, instead of having to guess)

The linkedin way (letting them connect to your gmail/yahoo account) is very convenient, but unfortunately pass the wrong message (that's ok to give to one service provider the login/pwd from another one).

X+

PS. I used to live in Glasgow, I bloody know that that's different than England, but you until get rid of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, let's import all under UK, shall we ?

[geilhufe]

Provide predefined mapping for standard formats (hint, outlook Wink

Anyone had a saved import mapping for outlook they want to share? If someone builds the mapping on demo.civicrm.org or their local install, then perhaps it can be grabbed and packaged up with the distro.

(I'll let other comment on the feasibility)

Any takers?

[xavier]

We have one on our install, I need some guidance on what to export, but willing to share.

How, on the import, a really nice to have feature: being able to set a standard value to be used for all the imported contacts :

eg "outlook address mike" -> source

X+

[Dave Greenberg]

An SQL dump of the the record from civicrm_mapping and the related civicrm_mapping_field rows should cover it. We can then look at folding that into the fixed data for 2.1.

BTW - it would be helpful if you have a way of helping us verify that the mapping you've got is reasonably generic (e.g. would be accurate / useable for all or most Outlook users). I don't know enough about variations in Outlook versions, configuration etc. to have a sense of this.

[speleo]

Exporting to Outlook 2007

I use the following SQL to get the contents of my db into a form that can be massaged into Outlook 2007. I know the reverse was talked about but maybe this will help with the mappings.

[Eileen]

The biggest hiccups I am facing right now are:

1) mail - I am hoping that the massmail_civicrm module will help here as we only need the unsubscribe level of functionality it provides but there are a few bugs still. I will go back to MS Office mail merges for now. Also, if I do get a mail program working I still have to determine that the user interface is simple enough for our users. Maybe TinyMCE will cut it but they are used to sending out word docs & pdfs with pictures etc. NB - I have thought about civiSMTP but have decided that the paying $5 per month is difficult administratively as we don't have credit cards and do have a cashbook based accounting system which relies on downloading transactions from one bank account.

2) reporting on $$$ received from each event. I have concluded that there is no link between the events & contributions so this isn't possible . This is a big limitation for us but I imagine we may have to go without for some time

3) Sending out invoices. This relates to pending event registrations not firing invoices and also we need to do occasional ad hoc invoices. I have installed Drupal invoices which will have to do for now.

I think that none of these issues will be solved in the near future so I will probably focus now on finding the easiest way of downloading the mailing list & user training.

I will aim so post a case study before too long

[FatherShawn]

Our biggest pain is no way to batch update "use household address"

Our existing database was already organized relationally between households and individuals.  So we were able to create these relationships at import, but not link in the address. The person hours involved in manually editing each individual contact to "check the box, select, save" for hundreds of contacts is causing a serious delay in deploying this solution.

[twowheeler]

I would echo Eileen's comments about email.  The massmail module is an interesting idea that I will be trying out soon.  Our users are intimidated by Civimail so I have to do it for them, which is not optimal for me at least.

To Father Shawn:  I have been working on a script that does the following:

• Get a list of all individuals in DB
• For each, search for a household with a matching address
• If found, link individual to household
• If individual address matches to household address, but last name is different, make the link but also tag the individual with "Household name mismatch" for later review.
• If not found, create a new household with the individual's address and link to it
• The households created have a name like "<last_name> Household"

It is a bit buggy right now so it is not ready to be shared but otherwise works on 99% of contacts.  It depends heavily on the street addresses being in similar format so that they match on a simple string search, so it helps a lot if they have been run through the USPS address verification feature.

If there is interest I will share the script when finished.

[FatherShawn]

Our case is even simpler than that.  Our households and individuals were related in FileMaker, so first we imported the households in to CiviCRM.  Then we imported the individuals and used the option to create a relationship on import using the household name field.  We need a simple:

If (individual is a member of a household) then
     set "use household address" to true
     use existing household relationship to set address

[sonicthoughts]

Integrating events into drupal nodes (ie. civinode for events) and  ditto  on all these!

The biggest hiccups I am facing right now are:

1) mail - I am hoping that the massmail_civicrm module will help here as we only need the unsubscribe level of functionality it provides but there are a few bugs still. I will go back to MS Office mail merges for now. Also, if I do get a mail program working I still have to determine that the user interface is simple enough for our users. Maybe TinyMCE will cut it but they are used to sending out word docs & pdfs with pictures etc. NB - I have thought about civiSMTP but have decided that the paying $5 per month is difficult administratively as we don't have credit cards and do have a cashbook based accounting system which relies on downloading transactions from one bank account.

2) reporting on $$$ received from each event. I have concluded that there is no link between the events & contributions so this isn't possible . This is a big limitation for us but I imagine we may have to go without for some time

3) Sending out invoices. This relates to pending event registrations not firing invoices and also we need to do occasional ad hoc invoices. I have installed Drupal invoices which will have to do for now.

I think that none of these issues will be solved in the near future so I will probably focus now on finding the easiest way of downloading the mailing list & user training.

I will aim so post a case study before too long

[Donald Lobo]

2) reporting on $$$ received from each event. I have concluded that there is no link between the events & contributions so this isn't possible . This is a big limitation for us but I imagine we may have to go without for some time

A paid event does result in a contribution record being created for each event participant (that completed it successfully). So not sure what you mean by this point

For all pending events, you need to do the "Update Pending Contribution" action in contribution search and flip them to completed/cancelled

lobo

[Eileen]

Re point 2

I want a report to match against my financial records like this:

Event 1 Total revenue $2000
Event 2 Total revenue $50
Event 3 Total revenue $600

I went through the database structure and couldn't see a link between completed contribution records and events - but let me know if there is one. I have thought of a work around although it's a bit unweildly from a permissions point of view. I could create a contribution type for each event and report on that rather than using event fees for all

[Dave Greenberg]

2) reporting on $$$ received from each event. I have concluded that there is no link between the events & contributions so this isn't possible . This is a big limitation for us but I imagine we may have to go without for some time

A paid event does result in a contribution record being created for each event participant (that completed it successfully). So not sure what you mean by this point

I think the "issue" (which has also been noted by Brian / lcdweb and a few others) is that there's no clean way in the interface to find / export / get totals on those contribution records BY EVENT. For 2.0 we added logic to prepend the event name to the contribution "Source" for offline event registration - so now you can search contribution source field for event name and potentially get all records: http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-2773 .

HOWEVER, I think we need a better way for folks to aggregate this info easily. How about including columns for Contribution Amount, Contribution Type, Contribution Status in the "standard" Find Participants export rows. We could look at including this in the export changes scheduled for 2.1. (Of course these cells would be empty for free events / participants who don't pay or for whom payment is not recorded - but that seems ok.)

[Dave Greenberg]

Re point 2

I want a report to match against my financial records like this:

Event 1 Total revenue $2000
Event 2 Total revenue $50
Event 3 Total revenue $600

I went through the database structure and couldn't see a link between completed contribution records and events - but let me know if there is one. I have thought of a work around although it's a bit unweildly from a permissions point of view. I could create a contribution type for each event and report on that rather than using event fees for all

Event registration records (civicrm_participant) are linked to the associated contribution record (civicrm_contribution) in the civicrm_participant_payment table (contains foreign keys to the contribution ID and participant ID). A civicrm_participant_payment record is created for each online event registration AND for offline event registration IF the "Record Payment" option is used (in 2.0 +). Hope that helps.