CiviCRM for BackdropCMS.org Planning Meeting Notes, 2021 05 14

Participants:

• Jack Aponte
• Jennifer Lampton
• Tim Erickson

GOALS: Answer some key questions about how we'd like to use CiviCRM for the Backdrop community; prioritize what we'd like to start using sooner rather than later.

• Beginning brainstorm questions:
  • What do we each imagine ourselves doing within CiviCRM once it's all set up? How often?
  • What do we anticipate other people will be doing within Civi, either soon after it's launched or sometime down the road?
• Of the things that CiviCRM can do, what are we already doing and how?
• What would we like to start doing in CiviCRM that we already do elsewhere, and in what order of priority?
• What would we like to start doing in Civi, either now or further down the road, that we are not already doing otherwise?
• How/where do we ideally want to do these things? E.g. directly on the main backdropcms.org site, via integration with events.backdropcms.org or other sub-sites, etc?

1. Move things we are already doing (elsewhere) to Civi

• mailing list (smtp + sendgrid is free -- currently paying for sendinblue)

2. Start tracking all our user data in the same place (Mailing list, event registration, donations) for more targeted messaging
3. New things we haven't ever done yet -- ask for donations, etc

What do we each imagine ourselves doing within CiviCRM once it's all set up? How often?

• Jen: learning how to do CiviCRM for our mailing list. We're paying for a service we don't have to pay for if we were to use Civi. We have a grant from SendGrid, massive amounts of credit, everything we do this year is free, we could use that with Civi to take advantage of that.
  • Goal is to send newsletters once a month; been moving towards that goal, Peter is doing it. Before that we'd be lucky to get one out with every major release.
  • Tim: we've hit 3 months straight recently, we're lagging a bit this month
  • Jen: Would be great to be able to have segmentation, e.g. anyone who's been to an event, anyone's who's already donated, regional groups, etc
  • Tim: Thinking not as much about mailings, hasn't seen how CiviCRM does that, knows about advanced tools, would love to try Civi to do the mailings
• Have lots of different lists of people, want to manage them in same place: mailing list, user accounts (if we can figure out SSO) -- then we'll know we have a single solid data source
  • If we could segment by region, interests etc, the lists might be more valuable. If we had targeted announcements, could be useful.
  • Jen: we have that info on user accounts in BackdropCMS but not on our mailing list; have that data, cannot use it.
• Tim: want to do volunteer management: track what people's interests are so when a specific thing comes up, e.g. artwork, we have a list of people who can help with those things, marketing, publicity, etc. Some people can be engaged if we know to reach out to them directly for certain things. Adds some admin overhead, not sure if we're up for the challenge, would like to experiment.
• Events
  • Tim: would love to be able to contact anyone with an interest in certain events, e.g. virtual user groups. It's contact everyone or no one right now. Events website, we saw possibility that even without Civi we could do that based on who signs up at the events website. Realized we could set up our own event registration, but Civi does that as well. Where do we do it?
  • Gather list of who's interested in what events
  • Never had registration for some events, don't have a way to remind people who are interested. Don't really need registration other than to know who's interested and communicate with them. Send reminders to people who have registered.
  • Central repository for people to say what topics they are interested in.
  • Scheduling unconferences? We're ready to announce a date, start soliciting speakers for events, but how to gather those session or topic ideas, we haven't settled on it yet.
  • Jen: event registration; donations as part of registration
  • Whether people have presented, volunteers, could be valuable in the future for targeted outreach
  • When we have in-person events, might be other metrics we want to track, things like meal choices, things we might want to carry over from one event to the next
  • Tim: geographical segmentation is useful for outreach for in-person or regional events
  • Jack explained high level overview of what Civi can do in terms of sharing public data. Lots of flexibility with views integration.
  • Jen: registration is an interesting question. In my experience with event registration, we did registration on the Drupal site and sent the data to Civi. Curious about how it would work the other way around; registration on Civi site, put that on the Drupal site. Don't know pros and cons of each. That experience was from 2010. For Camps, data was thrown out every year. On Backdrop side, want a user registration, a role, would let them submit session data, if they are accepted mark in Civi that they are a presenter. Doesn't matter whether it happens as a form submit on the web side or on the Civi side, same to the end user.
  • Tim: more specific question: what data do we want to save between events? What do we need to keep, what do we want to shed? Let's say we keep registration completely on the Backdrop events site but want to share some info in Civi for durability, whta is that? Who attended, how much they've donated, if they've volunteered, expressed interest in future events. Would be nice to ask about wanting to volunteer for Backdrop in general, would like to be able to collect that during registration and get that into Civi
• Donations outside of events
  • Donations: currently done through PayPal, would like to get it set up with SFC account, might make that more complicated. If we have one form that's set up and used forever rather than a different form for every site, want to make it easy long term without getting more help from the SFC.
  • Currently just have a Paypal button on the website, all the info goes to the SFC, we don't even know if they made a donation unless SFC tells us. Need to get in the middle of that process somehow, know who donated, how much, why
  • First event: did Eventbrite. Second event: did our Paypal account. We are not supposed to be collecting any money independently from the SFC. There are issues about that! In a perfect world, everything we collect should be sent directly to them. A bit of a mess. DONE: start talking to Pono at SFC ASAP about Civi donations going into SFC PayPal via API. Pono is in Zulip and in meetings too.

User stories:

• Tim
  • Scheduling Virtual User Groups, keeping them up to date, make sure we're collecting that data
  • Using it to identify who's interested in those groups, communicate with them;
  • bring up a list of people who are interested in presenting at VUGs when scheduling a new session
  • Volunteer management -- less clear on what that will look like, would like to do that better as an org. Specifically see myself tagging someone in Civi as being interested in something when it comes up in conversation in Zulip, would want to keep a record of that.
  • Through social media and other engagement, would be more likely to ask about what people would like to help with, would collect that data proactively instead of only asking when we need it. Currently don't know where to put info when people xpress interest in helping with things.
  • Don't know if we want to do this or not: would be nice to keep track of folks who are very active, e.g. if someone disappears for a long time, would like to be able to reach out to them, check in. Feels like that's a reasonable or good thing to do, but don't know how we'd do it right now besides completely anecdotally. Not envisioning anything invasive or super-thorough. But e.g. might track who's in weekly meetings; not sure we want to do this, but the possibility would be there and we COULD do targeted outreach
• Jen
  • Sending mailings, not sure whose job that would be, it's the job I've done in the past
  • Checking on stuff, using it to find info on folks past involvement if they have questions; not sure what that might be, e.g. did I register for an event, I thought I signed up for the mailing list, etc. In a support capacity, answering info@ email address. Administrative support for folks' engagement in the Backdrop community.
  • Might be involved on technical side of things, configuring integrations and other things, fixing issues.
  • If it was easier to do things, I might be inclined to do them more often!
• Other folks and their engagement?
  • Luke has lots of thoughts on how we could be using it from a marketing perspective; could be a powerful marketing tool. That's largely covered by mailing list/segmentation stuff we're talking about; Luke might have more specific ideas for marketing. Biggest one I could think of.
  • Jen: long-term vision for events: someone in a local area could log into our website, say "I want to host my own event," create a node with a date and time and location; if they could then invite everyone within a 300 mile radius, that would be sweet. They wouldn't have to collect or manage data, would just be leveraging group pool of Backdrop people. A pipe dream for the future; Tim tried that a bit with the VUG site. A way to reach people, similarly to how Drupal Groups used to work.
  • Tim: Civi could help with targeted sessions based on language

What would we like to start doing in CiviCRM that we already do elsewhere, and in what order of priority?

1. Donations - collecting them, tracking who
2. Mailings
3. Community member info, interests, how they want to be involved
4. Event registration

Mailings right now:

• Using Sendinblue right now; were using Mailchimp before
• Have free send credits with Sendgrid, would love to use a standard template, don't want to be handcoding, even if it's black and white boxes, fine

POSSIBLE THINGS IN THE FUTURE:

• Specific fundraising campaigns
• Civi could help with the conversations about monetizing Backdrop, e.g. opportunities to connect people with similar interests
• Merchandise? Processing payments, would that go through Civi?
  • There are only 3 or 4 orders a year; would be nice to switch to an automated, on-demand printing system
• Memberships, e.g. Drupal Association type of thing, Civi would make that possible
• Track Organization data, e.g. for memberships and other things. We have organizations on Backdrop site as node type. Having that kind of relationships between individuals and orgs.
• Reporting: being able to generate reports on fundraising, membership, volunteering, other forms of engagement.
• Ways to track current module maintainers in CiviCRM without having to manually do it; people who have submitted commits, commented in GitHub issues; would be nice to track engagement. Would be nice to be able to have that reporting and engage with those folks.

POLICY DECISIONS WE NEED TO MAKE:

• Who is using our CiviCRM? Who can access what?
• Who is changing things in Civi? Making decisions about those changes? Keeping track of what we're doing so we're not working at cross-purposes?
• What is okay to collect in CiviCRM? How do we decide that it's okay?

Many of these questions need to be answered for backdropcms.org more generally. We might try to start small, answer these questions for Civi, then move out from there.

NEXT STEPS:

• DONE: Share these notes with tech team, figure out implementation steps
• DONE: Put this on an Outreach meeting agenda
• DONE: Set up a policy decisions meeting
• TODO: Show and tell of an existing Civi setup, to see what it can do (possibly in same meeting as above)