What is CiviCase?

CiviCase is a way to track and manage a sequence of interactions between people in your organisation and contacts in CiviCRM. In addition to tracking and managing your organisation's interactions with clients or constituents, CiviCase can also manage internal organisational interactions.

CiviCase tracks interactions in two ways: as cases and as activities.

Activities are single interactions. For example, if a constituent calls to request information and the staff person directs them to a website, it would be recorded as an activity, with a brief description of how the staff person followed-up. CiviCRM will auto-generate some activities in conjunction with other actions, such as logging an email receipt for event registrations.

Cases are used to track more complex interactions or communication processes. Multiple activities can be grouped together into one case, and these activities can be optionally structured in a timeline. A case can be used to track a specific workflow that must be followed, for example: a client fills out an intake form, then has an initial meeting with a staff person, and finally receives a certificate from the organisation for meeting certain goals.

As well as linking activities around a common case, CiviCase identifies the people involved and their role(s) in the case. For example, a website project would be a case, with tasks such as design, develop and write content being activities within that case, and the people involved would have roles as designer, developer, tester, writer, etc.

Actual Scenarios

Organisations have employed CiviCase in a wide variety of situations. Here are a few examples of different types of organisations and how they might employ CiviCase.

Managing Legislator-Constituent Interactions

A Legislator's staff may manage hundreds of interactions with constituents and communities daily.  CiviCase provides a flexible and predictable way of allowing Legislative staff to manage and track these interactions while avoiding duplication (for example, if a constituent calls in about a topic that a staffer is already working on). CiviCase also automates the task of remembering and scheduling follow up activities by presenting staffers with a list of upcoming case activities that require their attention.

Below are some scenarios in which CiviCase can be used to effectively record interactions between Legislative staff and constituents:

• The Legislator's office receives a phone call from a constituent requesting agency support. A staffer logs the call as a CiviCase activity and then sets up a follow up call in the next week to make sure that action has been taken on the agency's behalf.
  
• A Legislative staffer records where and when a Legislator staff heard from a constituent about a government service problem.
• The Legislator's staff records event invitations that a Legislator's scheduler must respond to. 
• A Legislative staffer receives a phone call about illegal dumping near the caller's home. The staffer creates a case recording the location of the reported issue and assigns the task of following up with the Health Department to another member of the Legislator's staff. When the staff member logs in to CiviCRM they see that a new case activity has been assigned to them. The Staffer then contacts the Health Department on behalf of the constituent and mails the constituent to confirm that the Health Department has been informed of the situation.
  

Helping clients with emotional health or substance abuse problems

Social services agencies have specific workflows for processing clients through the variety of services that they provide. CiviCase can be used to outline and record the path that clients travel on their way to recovery.

When a client phones a social services agency, they will speak to an intake counsellor. The intake counsellor can set up a case to quickly record and determine what the clients' needs are, who are the people that need to be involved, and then set up a follow up meeting with a social worker.