Planning your data in CiviCRM¶
CiviCRM uses several building blocks to store data. Using them effectively takes planning: you need to understand the data you already have, decide what to transfer, and work out how to organise it in CiviCRM.
Understand your current data and contacts¶
Before thinking about CiviCRM’s structure, consider the systems you currently use to store and organise data. Information might be in spreadsheets, another database or CRM (such as Constant Contact, Convio or The Raiser's Edge), paper files, or someone’s memory.
Talk to co-workers about your contacts and their interactions with your organisation. Include people who have been around the longest and people who have just joined. Speaking with as many people as possible will help you understand interactions with different kinds of contacts.
Identify all the people involved with your organisation. What types of people do you interact with, and how do those types differ? Understanding your contacts and their interactions will help you model them in CiviCRM. Anecdotal or systematic feedback from contacts may also be useful.
Questions to ask about your current data¶
- Do you have an existing CRM?
- Do you have spreadsheets with information about your contacts, donations or other valuable data?
- Do you have any post-it notes or file cabinets with information about your community?
- Does anyone at your organization know a lot about community members?
- How does money come into your organization?
- What are the day to day tasks your staff and volunteers carry out?
- How do you currently communicate with your donors, members, volunteers and other community members? How would you like to communicate with them?
- How do you track activities and communications (emails, meetings, webinars, other events) that you have with your community?
- Do you have a list of donors interests and preferences?
- How do you handle new contacts?
- What classifications or labels are you using for your existing contacts (ie. alumni, students, parents, major donor, volunteer)?
- Are there any reports you would like to create? What information will they contain?
CiviCRM is designed to be flexible and adaptable, based on feedback from many different non-profits, but it may not map exactly to the way your organisation currently works. Working the CiviCRM way could mean adapting your workflow and adopting best practices in non-profit technology. Be pragmatic about whether your current working practices need to change.
CiviCRM also offers opportunities to interact with contacts in ways you may not have used before. Taking advantage of those possibilities can lead to positive changes and improvements.
Think about the move¶
It may help to think of your existing data as the contents of a house or apartment before a move. Moving is a chance to ask, “Do we really need this? This stuff is too old; let's trash it and get some new stuff once we have moved in.”
Look for data that no longer serve a purpose, such as organisational divisions you have abandoned or office locations in a facility you no longer occupy. But some old data retain their value. One organisation in a financial pinch used an old list of founding donors who had not given money for many years. Those lapsed donors still had strong emotional ties to the organisation they had founded and came to its financial rescue. In that case, keeping the old data was crucial.
A move is also a chance to clean what you decide to keep. Just as you would not pack dusty picture frames and dirty dishes into a clean new home, clean up your data before moving it into CiviCRM. You can read more about this in the Mapping your data section of this chapter.
Allow time to examine your old data, standardise how elements of contact records are stored (for example, whether states are entered as NY or New York), and delete obvious duplicates, accidental entries, outdated information and corrupted records.
The following chapters explain what data CiviCRM can store and how to map your existing records into CiviCRM’s structure.