CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello,

We use joomla as a website manager/editor.  I am just getting a handle on how to update the website and I have a lot to learn.  Our organization in general is still in the ice age in terms of data/contact management and keeping track of donations.  For contact management, we are currently using Microsoft Access, which obviously cannot be automatically updated when we send out an email to our listserve or when someone makes a donation through paypal on our website.  In addition, our board of directors receives many of the (check) donations, and they are located in a different country than we are.  What currently happens is when they receive checks, they compile a list (in a chart in a word document) of deposits into the account, send out thank you letters manually, and send us the list so we update the (poorly configurated) Access database.  I think it would be very useful to have an online contact and donor management database, so it could be accessed remotely by the board of directors, staff, etc.  I have a couple of questions, though:

1. Recently, I wanted to create a report from our Access database to do end of the year fundraising phone calls.  I wanted the report to be of all of our contacts in a certain state, for whom we had phone numbers for, and include in the report the name, address, phone number, email address (so this info could be verified during the calls), as well as a history of contributions that each of these people had made and the program they were interested in/involved in.  Is there a way in CiviCRM Reports to customize reports so I could create a separate report by state for those contacts we had phone numbers for and include in the report their donation/pledge history?

2.  One of our most recent advancements in technology is that we have begun to send out html emails through an email marketing manager, VerticalResponse.  The email canvas that VerticalResponse has seems to be quite superior to the one that CiviCRM has to send out emails, invitations, newsletters, etc, so I would like to continue using it if we began to use CiviCRM.  Is there any way to import the fact that we sent out an email (often with a paypal donation button) through verticalresponse, but track donations from it in CiviCRM?  Does this make sense? I am just beginning my journey to webdesign literacy and don´t know all of the lingo...

3. My most important question is whether someone with no programming and VERY minimal coding and website managing experience could handle uploading and managing CiviCRM along with our joomla website.  Is this even a possibility for an organization caught in the 90s?  Or would it be necessary to hire a webmaster, etc, to manage this?

Thank you in advance for the insight.

for your below needs (i.e. migration and integration with VR), you will need someone familiar with CiviCRM / websites and programming experience to help you get it all setup and migrated over

once things are setup, someone with limited experience can run the site on a day-to-day basis

lobo