CRM Implementation

CiviCRM is an open-source tool for tracking and connecting with your organization’s supporters—donors, prospects, members, event participants, and email subscribers…even volunteers, clients, and grantees. It includes tools for storing and searching for this information, but unlike many tools, it features easy-to-build donation forms, event registration, bulk email, and data collection form built right into your Drupal, Joomla, or WordPress site. (Don’t have one of those content management systems? We can build a new site for you or set up CiviCRM on its own.)

With your website, CiviCRM is hosted online, accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. Open-source software, it’s free to download and install yourself. Why involve us? We bring extensive experience with CiviCRM, and our staff have backgrounds in nonproﬁt fundraising, program management, and advocacy.

We learn about your organization’s operations, data needs, and website status, and we plan an installation that meets your current needs and future possiblities. For most organizations, the cost of hiring CiviCRM professionals is signiﬁcantly less than the lost staff time of tinkering with it yourself or dealing with a system that doesn’t match your work process.

Initial conﬁguration means making decisions about how to store information. Is something an attribute that belongs on a contact’s record, or is it really an activity to be recorded as involving the contact? Through conversation with clients, we solve these problems with our understanding of CiviCRM’s data structure and built-in tools as well as experience with dozens of organizations in similar situations.

Conﬁguration also means integrating your website with the CRM even beyond basic forms. We can set up CiviMail, the integrated bulk email system for CiviCRM. Membership organizations also make use of CiviCRM for restricted member-only content and dynamic member directories that automatically stay up-to-date.

CiviCRM 101 Webinar

Mika Weinstein recently led a CiviCRM 101 webinar introducing CiviCRM’s capabilities and interface. Watch the webinar for free here:

CiviMail SMTP Cost Calculator

If you are using CiviCRM’s built-in bulk email system, you may want to use a third-party SMTP system instead of sending large quantities of mail directly from your server.

How to create one-click personalized links in CiviCRM emails

One of the real advantages of CiviCRM is having an integrated donation, event registration, membership, and email system where information is already in the system. One of the best features is among the least-publicized: personalized links in emails that auto-populate the contribution, petition, event registration, or other form for the recipient.

Managing volunteers with CiviVolunteer

CiviVolunteer is one of several tools within CiviCRM that you can use to manage and cultivate volunteers for your nonproﬁt. Our team of experts at AGH Strategies knows CiviVolunteer inside and out, from helping you decide whether and how to use the extension to enhancing it with custom code to meet your needs.

CiviMail versus external email services

Deciding whether to use CiviMail or another service like MailChimp or Constant Contact with your CiviCRM system? We support both, and we put together the following comparison table.

CiviCRM Counties Extensions

We’re happy to introduce the US Counties extension for CiviCRM, allowing an easy method to load all the counties in the United States.

Using the extension

Enabling the extension runs the county loader, which loads all the counties in each state if they aren’t already in your database. From that point, the extension does nothing. You can even disable the extension, and the counties will stay there. Uninstalling the extension also does nothing, for an important reason: it could cause data loss by deleting data stored in addresses.

CiviEvent Widget for WordPress

You can use the CiviEvent widget to add two types of widgets for upcoming public events from CiviCRM. There’s no limit to the number of widgets you can add of either type. You can include the widgets in the sidebar like normal, or you can include them via shortcodes in the body of your posts.

Populate Employer for Anonymous Users (CiviCRM Extension)

This is the ofﬁcial documentation page for the Popemployer extension. It’s really simple—enable the extension, make sure anonymous users have “Access AJAX API” permission, and you’re all set. Only anonymous visitors will see the effect, and only if the form has both an email ﬁeld and a current employer ﬁeld.