wiki:projects/crm_review/features

Version 18 (modified by Jamie McClelland, 16 years ago) (diff)

merging and re-ordering

MFPL/PTP CRM Review project Features

This page will list the features we will be focusing on for the MFPL/PTP CRM review project.

Phase 1 Features

Member data collection and reporting

  • Collect/track basic info on individuals – name, address, contact info., more than one address per contact
  • Status of contact info – bad/disconnected phone or address
  • Extended individual info: Track individual’s demographics (age/number of kids, etc) and the ability to define demographic categories, member's language preference
  • Users can learn how to add additional fields if necessary
  • Ability to create households and assign individuals to households
  • Ability to track organizations and individuals associated with the organizations
  • Track membership dues and payments, flag “expired” dues payments
  • Track donations and payments.
  • Track willingness to volunteer for particular tasks (phoning, door-knocking, mailing, etc)
  • Track best contact method and best time to contact
  • Differentiate between types of contacts (member, supporter, ally, funder, etc)
  • Track where first contacted by organization
  • Track/assign primary staff contact
  • Track campaigns and member's participation in campaigns (no on 98 campaign, Light Rail CBA campaign, etc)
  • Leadership activities – facilitated a meeting, spoke at press conference, etc.
  • Hold voter information for individual records – precinct/district info, voting history, voter ID number
  • Track events – ability to track the details associated with event venue, costs, etc as well as ability to track individual’s disposition on the event (contacted, confirmed, attended) and ability to work with event as whole – view contacts for the event
  • Track history of contacts with a person
  • Relationship to organization (member, board member, journalist, donor, funder etc) is this different from type of contact? Yes - you can have more than one relationship to an organization
  • Assign issues to events, campaigns, etc. (rather than assign interest issues to individuals, assign them to the campaigns and events that they might attend, then calculate their interests based on their activity).
  • Add interest level

General Reporting/Exporting

  • Exporting sets of data is reasonably easy - most or all reports that show data on screen have an option to download the on screen data in CSV or similar format.
  • Flexible reporting, advanced - an interface is available for advanced users to create reports based on arbitrary search fields and output fields. This feature will sacrifice ease of use for flexibility, requiring users to understand the underlying table/field schema.
  • Flexible reporting, beginner - an interface is available for regular users to choose from a reasonable set of pre-defined search and output fields presented in a way that makes sense to users.
  • Standard outputs – labels, letters, phone sheets, walk sheets, lists of emails (or connect to external email sending program)

Access/Controls

  • Multi-site access - the database is fully functional via a web browser over the Internet (or via a similarly available and free client program).
  • Ability to define levels of access - enable certain login IDs to have read-only access, others to have limited read or read/write access, others to have unlimited access
  • Accessible via mobile web devices

Membership metrics

  • Capacity to use the contact and event history to calculate a “participation” level and therefore allow a leadership level
  • automatic calculation of "membership level." Different types of participation are assigned different numerical scores (coming to an event = 1; speaking at event = 3, etc) and the database will automatically calculate a running total of each person's membership level. Or something similar - the goal is to aggregate an individual's participation in a meaningful way to facilitate comparative analysis between people.
  • Automatic generation of issue area interest based on participation in events tagged to issue areas

Usability

  • Easy and intuitive to use

Developer/Code

  • Free software
  • Responsive developer community
  • Reasonably clean code
  • includes an open API so that other tools can be integrated
  • Programitcally easy to extend

Phase 2 Features

  • ability to connect to/integrate with social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace
  • ability to "internationalize" software interface
  • relatively easy to import a list that has been enhanced with voter/consumer data

Phase 3 Features