Summary

This chapter outlined how to use CiviCRM to improve how you communicate with your organization's constituents. The first section focused on the broader topic of how communications should be aligned with the organization's overall CRM strategy.

Subsequent sections gradually built from sending an e-mail to one or a few constituents to sending out bulk e-mails to hundreds or thousands. Not all of the focus was on e-mail communications. We also looked at using CiviCRM to print labels for postal mailings, recording those mailings as activities for all the recipients including a softcopy of the letter, and printing personalized letters.

We then looked at strategies for list building using CiviCRM profiles to enable users to subscribe to bulk e-mail products like newspapers. While implementing profiles in recipe-style format, we took into consideration the differences and options present in Drupal and Joomla! installations.

As lists are being built and constituents are communicated with, the...