CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We want to begin tracking referrals so that we can reward members for bringing others. Has anyone done this in an automated way? If so, how did you do it? How well does it work?

Adding a referral code field to the account creation profile seems like a start, but we wonder if there are other approaches. Also, is there an easy way to convert those referral codes into relationships?

In addition, we would like to be able to use different URLs in ads to track their effectiveness. Again, has anyone done this in an automated way? Is there an easy way to pre-fill some fields in a profile based on the URL that generated the page?

We are using Drupal 6.22 and CiviCRM 3.4.x, but will soon (we hope) be upgrading to Drupal 7 and CiviCRM 4.x and would be equally happy with a Drupal based solution as with a CiviCRM native one.

Thanks in advance.

From what I understand of the tell a friend functionality, it would not work for what we are trying to do. It seems to be based totally on e-mail and seems to be limited to signing up for events. What we want are two things a simple code (like a coupon code) a user/member/participant can give someone so that when that user registers for the site, they are tracked as having been referred by XXX, and the ability to create different URLs for the same event or registration that would automatically fill in that field (so that the ad for the event in the Wall Street Journal would reference:
https://example.com/rally-1-wsj and the one from the Spartacus Youth Journal would reference: https://example.com/rally-1-syj).

It is possible that I do not understand how tell a friend works, but this is the documentation I found on it: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC40/Tell+A+Friend