[GSOC 2015] Integration with Social Media

[s0014]

Hello all,

I am Siddharth Gupta, a final year BTech student from IIIT Delhi, India. Last year, I worked on Data visualization project (https://github.com/TechToThePeople/civisualize) mentored by Xavier Dutoit as a part of GSoC 2014. During last one year I have been working on the same and have had some wonderful interaction with the CiviCRM community. This not only helped me in understanding civi in a better way, but also understand the use cases of the same.

As a part of Google Summer of Code 2015, I would like to propose "CiviCRM Social Media Integration" as a project. After going through some of the websites with brilliant social media integration(like change.org, digg) and looking at Facebook graph API, I think the following few can be achieved from the project.

Events:

• CiviEvents can connect to Facebook Events, letting people RSVP on both CiviCRM as well as Facebook, this not only improves the social reach of the event, but also let the participants invite their social media friends to the event.
• Collecting all the public Facebook posts, tweets about a particular event, and collect them and show them on a particular event. This can further be used to calculate reach of the event, which can then be visualized using Civisualize on the event page.
• Letting people add badges to their profile picture (something like https://www.picbadges.com/)

Donations

• We can let users send personal messages to their friends, sharing their donation information, and inviting them to donate for the same.

Contacts

• By allowing users to sign up using social media, we can help them fill their incomplete contact information. This will not only help them fill their forms easily, but help us with a further validated form data.

I have personally used some of the nodes of Facebook Graph API and have read about user interactions with social media. The above are one of the following few possibilities in the project, please suggest/give feedback on what we should focus on for the same.

Thanks,

[xavier]

Hi,

Some other ideas:
display the latest tweets (or fb if we can) on the contact summary if we have the msg

get all the people (or fb if we can) tweeting about an event or contribution or petition in civi and try to match them with contacts we have already (rapportive.ly?) and save the tweet as an activity

twitter DM/@msg or post of FB walls. eg automatically thanking someone

fetching/pre-filling forms (not only event, but petition or donations) from the data in their social media profile (including image from FB)?

It'd be awesome if some of the orgs working on privacy could join, it's easy to cross the creepy line when integrating with social networks.

X+

P.S. For privacy reasons, I personally don't use FB, so my knowledge about what can actually be done is mostly through ideas and requests from my customers.

[s0014]

I completely agree with the fact that we will have to start by creating a line between what is acceptable and what is not, this will help us in defining the scope of event.

[nicolas]

Social Media is probably one of the weakest aspects of CiviCRM, specifically when compared to the newer CRMs on the market. So any improvements would be more than welcome!

BTW - It might be nice to have a closer look at Nation Builder (or others) to see which features could be translated to CiviCRM ...

[xavier]

Most definitely we should get inspired/steal with pride

[s0014]

Hey,

I tried to create an account on Nation Builder just to checkout its features, but could as it was not expecting Indian Debit Cards. Does anyone from the civi community has an account who can help me identifying the features nationbuilder is able to provide.

Another thing I was looking for is, is the integration something that people will look for in the core or would like it as an extension to what already civi has.

[Chris Burgess]

I've seen a couple of CiviCRM sites try NationBuilder for campaigns, and my takeaway from exploring it was not so much that it does *more* but that it does *less* and does it well enough. Need to bear that in mind when striving for feature parity - remember that NOT doing things is a feature too!

I think NB's simpler model made it easier for those sites to get more team members using the product, even though the page builder and other tools felt less flexible than the all-powerful CMS toolkits we might be familiar with as site builders.

It's still pretty flexible. I can see the appeal.

I also was interested to look at the Attentive.ly site as a result of seeing Joe Murray's CiviCRM integration for it today. Attentive.ly sounds like a great toolkit for a site with an engaged SM team. Also, creepy as hell but if you have an SM team you already got over that one

Since CiviCRM always integrates with a host CMS and those CMS all have SM tools available as add-ons, I think it's a good idea to focus on  where CiviCRM can contribute something new / special to the mix rather than implement things already available through existing plugins / modules for CMS.

[Chris Burgess]

@sid - just reach out to NB and request a developer account, explain that their payment system doesn't let you sign up. I found them to be quite helpful, and they provided me with a free dev NB account while I was testing stuff.

[xavier]

Hey,

FYI, I've asked a civi member that works on privacy to give input during the project, so we hopefully stay on the right side of the creepy line. Or at least, offer configuration options to stay on the right side

[s0014]

Hey Chris,

Thanks for the feedback. I wrote an email to NB, and is now waiting for their reply.

Since CiviCRM always integrates with a host CMS and those CMS all have SM tools available as add-ons, I think it's a good idea to focus on  where CiviCRM can contribute something new / special to the mix rather than implement things already available through existing plugins / modules for CMS.

I completely agree to this, I saw a lot of different plugins for Drupal which lets you sign up through social media accounts. I would like to know your opinion on starting with Events.

[Owen]

One potential idea that utilises the CRM aspect of CiviCRM.

Many orgs who use Civi are using the data in it to see how engaged different contacts are with the organisation. Donating or attending an event gives a sure measurement of being engaged but so does data like people who are opening emails sent from CiviMail. It would be great to know who is following an organisation on social media and also who is interacting via likes/retweets etc.. Having a "Social media follower" and "Social media engager" group/tag.

[JohnFF]

@Owen: each org would have its own rules for this. So what would be needed is a system where activity / event role of type X counts for Y points until Z. Certainly FF has its own formula for engagement, which has been/is iterated a lot!

[s0014]

Hey,

I was successful in getting a developer account at NationBuilder, and has now gone through some of the things they let you interact with Social Media. I am trying to list them down here, and a possibility of how we can include them in Civi.

Twitter

• NationBuilder asks you to login using your twitter account, and asks for permissions of getting a list of your followers. As most twitter profiles are public, it take information from their account and create NB's people account for each one of them. You now can interact with them in a lot of different ways. And they can sign into the your Nation using their twitter account. Attached is a screenshot of http://s11.postimg.org/yixlwwbvn/NB_Twitter.png. you can also notice a Social Capital Score for every member, I am not sure how is it calculated but we can have a similar klout score thing.
• I think Civi can also make use of twitter followers as contacts/or just as followers which can be contacted through a dashboard within civiCRM. Now, allowing users to sign up in an organization is also something which we should go for IMO.

Facebook

• NB ask you for managing page permission, when you connect your Facebook account. It then ask you to select a page you represent you organization with. It then let admin to post/schedule posts. Moreover these posts go on your Twitter/Facebook both.
• This is something that can surely be included in Civi.
• While creating Events, we can ask user to select a facebook event representative of the same, and then admin post/schedule post for the same. Also ask people signing up for event t RSVP on Facebook to promote reach of the event.

Along with all this, we can have better integration of like/share/tweet button.

[Chris Burgess]

I still feel like this is looking at the problem from the details. Great architecture does not come from copying doorways from the Taj Mahal and plumbing from the Sistine Chapel. In fact it doesn't come from copying, it comes from innovating and builds on existing approaches.

But since this isn't a blue-sky talk about what social features we could innovate on (hoping this will be on the schedule at CiviCon), let's focus here on what we can learn (not copy!) from NationBuilder. I'd start with a step back to think about the *real* benefits of NationBuilder's social integration without focusing on the details. What does it do at a high level? More importantly, what are the underlying goals / ideas?

A small example of a feature I was impressed by personally:

What does it do?

* Easier account creation - "one click" using peoples existing social networks
* Simplified management of the mappings between social networks - "This retweet is from a person who has the same name as this Facebook supporter; merge contacts?"

Why does it do it?

* It's hard for online CRM to accurately identify people, but humans like to be treated as humans. NationBuilder approaches this by offering a humane way for people to register support for a Nation, then a humane means for Nation owners to connect supporter actions across multiple networks.

----

Once we know our goal we can consider the route.

Can CiviCRM utilise tools like Drupal's OpenID Connect, OpenID Provider or WordPress OpenID for the one-click signin? Great, then let's not reinvent that part*; let's focus on whether CiviCRM is capable of applying its featureset (eg duplicate identification and merging) to the second part of the question*.

* Documenting a recipe for doing this in Drupal / WordPress / Joomla might be a valuable contribution though, and might be something an integrator rather than a developer can work towards.

** I want to stress that I'm using a specific small-but-significant NB feature as an example here, not as a statement of what we should do.

[Chris Burgess]

* CiviEvents can connect to Facebook Events, letting people RSVP on both CiviCRM as well as Facebook, this not only improves the social reach of the event, but also let the participants invite their social media friends to the event.
* Collecting all the public Facebook posts, tweets about a particular event, and collect them and show them on a particular event. This can further be used to calculate reach of the event, which can then be visualized using Civisualize on the event page.
* Letting people add badges to their profile picture (something like https://www.picbadges.com/)

I like these ideas.

Yes I see advantages in pulling event RSVPs both ways from FB <=> CiviCRM - but we'd have to be careful as I think going FB => CiviCRM might be misinforming; an RSVP on Facebook is not the same thing as a "real-world" RSVP. I think CiviCRM => FB would be of more benefit here, and I think this suggestion is the most valuable of the three relating to events.

Pulling in a feed of Tweets / FB posts about an event would be a good way to showcase the engagement level. This can look a bit dire if there's nothing to showcase! And can be easily poisoned by malcontents, spammers, or just social media noise.

Badges, they can be a good way to get ongoing placement in peoples SM profiles but I think they're a bit dated now - Eyecatching a few years ago, now probably less value. (Seems PicBadges is a service for this, but their website was pretty uninformative and I was a bit put off by the demand for my sign-in before they'd tell me more ... and the spelling mistake suggested to me it may be a bit amateur. Gosh I'm hard to please!)