CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We have developed a custom CiviCRM 2.2.8 for what are essentially our chapter organizations. We are now supporting more than 8 organizations, each with their own instance, and we have plans to expand to at least 5 more.  We've been contracting with CivicActions on this, and much of the work we've paid to develop/fix over the years has been added back to the core, as far as I understand.

Now, miraculously, we are ready to start using CiviCRM ourselves!  We don't actually need many of the same customizations that our "chapters" do, so we are comfortable with starting with a clean newest version of the newest release (3.x -- whatever it is when we are finally ready), and we are very impressed.

I just have a few use cases that I'm curious about.  These are things we have done very easily with our old offline donor/membership database, and we want to be sure we will be able to build in the same capabilities when/if we make the switch. 

Sorry if this is too much for one post.  I'm happy to split it into many if that's easier, but I think it's all relevant to CiviContribute functionality and maybe CiviReport.  (Since the original database we started supporting did not have CiviReport, I'm not as familiar with it's capabilities.)

1)  Pulling a list for a mail merge letter or a telemarketing campaign that says "your last gift was ____."

We do both in-house and out-of-house telephone fundraising campaigns where we need to pull a list (export) of fields (some, perhaps, custom, but mostly standard contact fields) so that a caller, who may not have access to CiviCRM, can speak to a donor and tell them when they last gave and how much they gave.  Preferably, the caller could tell them the last couple of gifts and maybe also pull a field that would show them a "largest gift" and/or "average gift".

 
2)  Doing an advanced search (not in CiviContribute) based on contribution criteria that allows you to see the gift that triggered the search.

For instance.  I want to see all my DONORS (not gifts) who ever gave more than $500, and I want to see just how much they gave.  If I do this search in CiviContribute, I get a list of all of the gifts and therefore see each donor multiple times.

3) Getting a listing that would include people's largest gift--like for a major donor campaign--instead of having to go into each individual's record and sort by contribution amount.

4) Including gift information as triggers in CiviMail, e.g. - LastGiftAmount, LastGiftDate, etc.