Configuring

This chapter shows how to set up CiviCRM, and particularly its contribution management component, CiviContribute, to support fundraising. Throughout CiviCRM, the term "contribution" refers to any financial transaction or payment taking place in the system: a donation, event fee payment, membership dues payment, or other similar transaction.

This chapter assumes you have a working understanding of custom fields, contact matching rules, CiviCRM Profiles, and the CiviMember and CiviMail components. The chapter also assumes you have already set up your payment processor, configured contribution types, and created any custom fields you want to use when tracking contributions.

General Configurations

You may need to configure the following fields before you begin setting up various methods for managing contributions.

• Contribution Types and Accounting Codes: Navigate to Administer > CiviContribute > Contribution Types, where you can edit one of the existing contribution types or create a new one by clicking Add Contribution Type.  Once you edit or add a contribution type, you can define an accounting code that corresponds to your accounting system (the accounting code will be exported along with the contribution data if you do an export), and indicate whether this type of contribution is tax-deductible.  Be careful when editing core contribution types or adding new types, because CiviCRM has useful built-in functionality that depends on the core contribution types.
  
• Premiums: Navigate to Administer > CiviContribute > "Premiums (Thank-You Gifts)" to configure premiums, such as T-shirts or subscriptions, that you want to offer on your Online Contribution Pages. You can edit an existing premium or click Add Premium to add a new one. Once you edit or add a premium, you can then enter additional information: Name, Description, SKU (an optional product code), Premium Image (an optional image of the item), Minimum Contribution Amount to receive the premium, Market Value of the premium, Actual Cost, and Options (e.g., colors and sizes).  If you're offering a subscription or service, you can also click on the Subscription or Service Settings and define additional information here, such as Period type (e.g., Fixed or Rolling), the Fixed Period Start Day, the Duration, and the Frequency.
  
• Accepted Credit Cards: Navigate to Administer > CiviContribute > Accepted Credit Cards to edit existing acceptable credit cards or define a new option through Add Accept Creditcard. 
• Payment Instruments: Navigate to Administer > CiviContribute > Payment Instruments to edit existing options that can be used for contributions or to add a new option through Add Payment Instruments .  The common options--credit card, cash, check, debit card, and EFT--are installed by default.
  

Online Fundraising

One of the most useful aspects of CiviCRM is its integration with your site's content management system.  Once integrated with either Drupal or Joomla!, CiviCRM allows you to build an unlimited number of contribution pages that can be seamlessly accessed from your website. Contribution pages can be used to:

• Accept donations and other contributions
  
• Process membership signups and renewals
• Run a specific fundraising campaign

This section will walk through each of those three scenarios and point out some options and features that may be useful. Once you answer all the necessary questions and consider all the points mentioned in the chapter, you can build your contribution pages. Step-by-step documentation for doing that is available at http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Manage+Contribution+Pages.

General Online Contribution Page

Before you configure a general contribution page, ask:

• What contribution type will be used to categorize contributions received via this page?
  
• Do you want to allow people to give in honor or in memory of someone?
• What other data do you want to capture from your donors and contributors? These can be collected in predefined CiviCRM fields or custom fields that you have created previously. The only field required by CiviCRM to process a contribution is an email address. Typically you will want to collect additional contact information for the contributor. These should be added using a Profile.
  

  If possible, build the profile of fields that you will expose on the contribution form before you build your contribution page. A contribution page can include up to two profiles. If you do not create your profile before creating your contribution page, you can complete the process and return at a later time to add a profile.
  

• Can individuals contribute on behalf of an organization? This is most commonly used for membership sign-up pages (discussed later).
  
• Do you want to allow people to pledge a certain amount as they contribute? A pledge is a commitment to give a certain amount over a certain period of time--for instance, a fixed amount deducted from a credit card every month. Pledges are a great way to allow your supporters to provide long-term support to your organization.
  
• What are the amounts you want people to choose from? Some organizations call these "donation levels" and they're important because they give a potential donor a range and suggestions of what to give. You may also allow donors to complete an "other amount" field and ignore your predefined giving levels.
• What text do you want to appear in the following?
• • The introduction of the contribution page
  • The footer of the contribution page
  • The text for the thank-you page
  • The automatic email receipt sent to the contributor (optional)
• Do you want to enable the "tell-a-friend" feature? This allows donors to forward the page to friends, which can be very powerful in spreading your message throughout their social networks.
• Do you provide premiums such as T-shirts or tote-bags to donors who give a certain minimum? If you do, be sure to set up your premiums within the CiviCRM administration pages first, as described earlier.
  

Once you have answered and resolved all of these questions, you can build your contribution page. Go to CiviContribute and click on Manage Contribution Pages > New Contribution Page. The options and settings should map pretty clearly to the choices you made for the questions listed in this section.

Membership Sign-up Donation Page

CiviContribute is closely integrated with CiviMember, the membership management component of CiviCRM.  This means that your online contribution pages can allow people to join your organization at predefined membership levels.  When people do, they create not only a membership record for themselves but a corresponding contribution record.

You must create all of your membership types and status settings within CiviMember before you build your online membership sign-up page.

Before building your membership sign-up page, you need to ask most of the questions listed in the previous section for the contribution page. A couple of additional questions include:

• Should this page be used only for membership sign-up purposes, or can people give general contributions as well? Membership-based organizations usually use their contribution page only for membership sign-up, which means they do not allow a variety of contribution amounts and membership sign-up is required.
  
• Which membership types allow sign-ups? Some membership types in your organization may be for administrative use only.
  

If your organization allows organizations as well as individuals to become members, you will need to allow individuals to join on behalf of an organization. Depending on your membership structure, you may want to require this behavior.

Campaign Fundraising Page

In addition to the questions in the previous sections about how the contribution page will be used and what information it will capture, CiviCRM includes some exciting features for campaign fundraising purposes:

• The campaign contribution page can have a start and end date along with a goal.  You can then create a widget to embed on your website to show the progress of the campaign toward the goal (see the following screenshot).
  
  

• Wouldn't it be great if your constituents could do some of the fundraising for you? CiviCRM has a feature called Personal Campaign Pages (PCPs) that allows you to let people create their own fundraising page for your organization. This means that a donor, after donating to your organization, can elect to create a page with her own photo, text, and personal information. She can then send a link to the page to her friends, soliciting support for your organization. This is a powerful way to widely and quickly spread the message about your campaign. 
  
  When someone donates through a personal campaign page, a soft credit is given to the owner of the page to recognize the role she played in the contribution. CiviContribute has a section that allows you to administer all of the PCPs for your organization as well as moderate PCPs you don't approve of. Lastly, you can provide an "Honor Roll" for your contacts who build PCPs, highlighting the donations made through their pages. (Donors need to opt in to have their names displayed in the honor roll).
  

Publicizing your campaign

Now that you've created your contribution page, it's time to bring people to the page so they can contribute. Naturally, you will display a link to the page prominently on your website through a donate button or menu item. Here are some additional tips for promoting a contribution page in different CiviCRM configurations:

• Joomla!: The most direct way to expose your contribution page or membership signup/renewal page to the front of your website is by creating a menu item. Navigate to a menu and create a new CiviCRM item. From the list of menu options, choose Contributions. In the basic parameters section, select the contribution page you would like exposed from the dropdown menu. Save the menu item and view the website to confirm the page's functionality.
• Drupal: From the contribution page listing, select Live Page to view the finished page. You can then copy the URL and include it in a content page or assign it to a menu item.
  
• Standalone:  From the contribution page listing, select Live Page to view the finished page and link to it.

Emailing your current membership is the other critical way to publicize the campaign. The CiviMail component of CiviCRM allows you to send targeted emails to any group of contacts in your database. Within a CiviMail message you can include links to the contribution form and use CiviMail's tracking capability to see how many people click on that link.

One time-tested way to increase contributions is to send each targeted constituent a personalized email with a link to the contribution form that has all of their contact information already filled in. This saves them the hassle of filling it out and raises the chances that they donate. Using CiviMail, you can use this feature by creating a special link in the body of your CiviMail message that includes a checksum token. A checksum is a unique and pseudo-random number assigned to each recipient of the mailing that points back to their contact information, securely stored in your database.

When people click on the special link, CiviCRM looks them up in the database and pre-fills fields on the contribution form (core fields or fields exposed via a profile) with any information in their contact record.  To read more on how to do this and what the link path must be, visit: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Mail-merge+Tokens+for+Contact+Data

Automatic Contribution Recording

Regardless of how donors get to your contribution page, CiviCRM automatically records their donations, freeing your staff from doing manual data entry. If the donors already exist in the database, CiviCRM adds the contribution to their existing record. If they don't exist, CiviCRM creates a new record for them.

To record contributions in the appropriate records, CiviCRM must identify the donor correctly by comparing the information they enter into the contribution page to their contact in the database. By default, CiviCRM checks just the contributor's email address. In other words, if Judith Monroe has a contact record in CiviCRM with an email address of judith@example.com and she puts in that email address when she contributes, but with the first name of Judy, the contribution will correctly go into her record. If she puts in another address, such as a Hotmail or Gmail account, a new record will be created and you may have to manually clean it up later. Note that this problem appears only for anonymous visitors (those not currently logged into your website). Once users log into the website, CiviCRM recognizes them in the system and will attribute any activity to their records.

We recommend that you configure CiviCRM to match contact information very strictly by changing the default duplicate matching rules.  In our opinion, it is better to risk creating a new (duplicate) record for someone who is already in the database than to incorrectly credit their donation to someone else. It is not uncommon for multiple people to share an address such as info@example.org  or judyandjim@example.com, the default rules may find the wrong contact if such a shared email address is entered. We recommend you change the duplicate matching strict rule so that the first name, last name, and email must all match. This raises the bar on whether data is merged with an existing record, increasing the change that a new record will be created. Using CiviMail's automatic fill-in feature (the checksum token) will help avoid some of these issues. To configure your duplicate matching rules, navigate to Administer CiviCRM > Find and Merge Duplicate Contacts.

Offline fundraising

Organizations have plenty of offline opportunities to raise money. You may pick up donations at events or solicit donations via postal mailings. For money raised through any of these offline activities, your staff needs to enter the results manually.

There are three steps in offline fundraising: creating your lists, creating your mailings, and manually entering contributions.

Creating your lists

This process is fairly straightforward if you are familiar with CiviCRM's search capabilities.

1. Create a list of records to receive your offline postal mail appeal (this can be your entire database if you like). If you want to later track the success of a mailing or if you are tracking who receives certain appeals, it is recommended you save the search results as a group.  Later on, you can mark everyone in that group as recipients of that appeal using the Record Activity for Contacts option under the "- actions-" menu.
   
2. From a search (whether a search of the groups' members or of other criteria) you will see an "- actions -" dropdown menu that allows you to, among other things, export the list as a CSV file. Select all records or a subset using the checkboxes, choose "export", and click Go.
3. As you export to a CSV spreadsheet, you can determine which fields you want to export to your spreadsheet and save the list of exported fields as an export mapping for future use. By default, CiviCRM will export a great deal of data, including contacts' names, contact information, email addresses, phone numbers, and a list of their groups and tags.

Creating your mailings

Once your spreadsheet is created, you can do a mail merge using any popular word processing software (such as OpenOffice.org Writer, the Free Software Word Processor) that will insert any fields you want in the letter.

CiviCRM can also create mailing labels for you. Perform the same search you used in the previous section to create your list of recipients, but under the More Actions menu, choose Mailing Labels. Then select the mailing label number, determine whether you want to exclude people with "do not mail" checked in their privacy options (checked by default and recommended), and whether you want to merge two records that have the same mailing address into one label. This last option is very useful when you are mailing a household or organization and you don't want them to receive duplicate mailings. When the records are merged, each name at that address appears on its own line on the label. Once you click 'Make Mailing Labels," a PDF document will be created that you can print.

Its important to note that many nonprofit organizations in the United States have to sort recipients of a mailing based on zip code for bulk mailing purposes. If this is true for your organization, it is recommended you do not create your mailing labels within CiviCRM, but instead create them using word processor merge functions where you have control over the sort order. You can reuse the same spreadsheet for the mail merge you exported in the previous section.

Payment processors

A payment processor is a tool that integrates with CiviCRM to process live credit card transactions. In other words, it accepts the credit card information submitted by your site visitor, processes it, and transfers money to your organization's bank account.  As of this writing, the payment processors compatible with CiviCRM include:

• PayPal (website standard and pro)
  
• Authorize.net
  
• PayJunction
  
• Google Checkout
  
• Moneris eSelect Plus 
• Elavon / Nova
  
• eWAY
  
• PayJunction
  
• PaymentExpress
  
• ClickAndPledge
  

Each has their own pricing structure and features, benefits and drawbacks.  You should carefully investigate each available option to determine what's best for you.  Important things to consider include:

• Availability in your country and currency
  
• Cost (setup costs, monthly cost, transaction fees and commission percentage)
• Security: whether you want to, and are able to set up your own Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate or whether you would prefer a payment processor that captures credit card information on its own website. Does the payment provider provide protection against fraud and liability?
• Ability to control branding: does the payment processor take users off your CiviCRM site and does this matter to you?
• Ability to accept recurring payments: Only one or two payment processors are able to do this at the time of writing.
  
• Ease of use for your customers:  does the site visitor need an account with the transaction provider in order to process payment?
• Reputation and reliability: Ask other CiviCRM users about their experiences with payment providers.
  

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL/HTTPS)

If you wish to collect credit card information through a CiviCRM form (as opposed a payment processors own website) you must configure your site for Secure Sockets Layer encryption. Alternatively, choose a processor such as Paypal Standard, Elavon or PaymentExpress where the customer is redirected to the payment processor's website to enter their credit card details and back to your site afterwards.

Visitors to your website can determine that their data is encrypted when they see a symbol (often a padlock) somewhere in the browser or by noting that the "http:" part of your url has been replaced by "https:".

To enable SSL, you will need an SSL certificate. An SSL certificate should be purchased through a reputable third party provider, and may range in price from USD to USD0 a year depending on the company and the level of service and protection they provide.

If you are using shared hosting or a virtual private server (VPS), it is likely that your hosting provider has a list of preferred vendors they work with to provide SSL security. Contact your hosting provider for more information and to get help installing the SSL certificate.

SSL certificates are domain-form specific. If purchased and installed to your root domain (something that looks like example.org), it does not automatically work for subdomains, such as http://www.example.org or http://contribute.example.org. Discuss the options available with your hosting provider and ensure that the certificate and its installation will meet your needs. Wherever possible, purchase a certificate that will cover both the root domain and www form of your domain.

Once the certificate is installed and you have tested its functionality by browsing to a page on your site using https (rather than http), you should enable SSL redirection in CiviCRM. To do this, navigate to Administer CiviCRM > Global Settings > Resource URLs > Force Secure URLs (SSL) > Yes. This will force any pages that include contribution-related information (i.e., credit card fields) to redirect to the secure form of the URL (https).

After you enable the Force Secure URLs setting and save the page, CiviCRM will automatically check to ensure the SSL certificate is activated and working properly.  You should also navigate to a contribution page on your website to confirm that https redirection works correctly. 

PCI DSS Compliance

The prevalence and impact of online fraud has led to increased security measures to counteract the schemes of fraudsters. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard sets out security standards that all major credit cards require sites to comply with. If your CiviCRM page accepts card numbers directly rather than sending visitors to your payment processor web page, your site and its hosting environment may need to comply with those standards. Some payment processors, notably Moneris, put some of the compliance burden on you by making you complete a long and technical Self-Assessment Questionnaire.

For more information, visit: https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/