Determining your needs

Depending on your process—Agile, or more traditional—you will determine your needs in a less or more formal way. Whatever your process, some approaches are always appropriate.

First of all, it's useful to review the functionality, data structures, and data in your existing systems. Functionality is the easiest to discuss. It provides a sense of the sets of fields—custom data and profiles in CiviCRM's terminology—that may be needed in the new system. When analyzing existing systems, don't be limited to your primary contact database alone. For example, if you use paper sign-up sheets at events or have other paper, e-mail, or web-based data collection forms that are not part of your primary system, be sure to include them in the discovery analysis. With data structures, you'll be able to start mapping out how to migrate data from the existing to the new system. As part of this, you'll be able to identify the custom fields that may be needed, and others that are no longer...