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.

Thanks, Dave.  I'm still not quite adept at CiviReport, but I can't find any place that lets me search or gives an output for a 'largest gift' or 'average gift' field.

You'll need to play with the reports (and potentially enhance them if they don't quite do what you need). Donation Summary Repeat does show total and count, which "implies" the average. Donor Detail shows all in the search range w/o repeating donor info - so that could be used to see "largest". OR you might need to write your own that does just what you want using the framework and the existing reports as a model.

You can include and export custom contribution fields - but otherwise you'll need to modify the report code.

Advanced (contact) search will allow you to search by contrib range and then export pretty much any Contact data you want.

All in all, might not be perfect fit / exactly the same as what you have now. So you can either contribute code or sponsorship to get it closer or go for another solution.