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Hello, here is the summary of 6.5 responses to the CiviCRM interview summaries. I'll follow up with a proposed outline for documentation.
Question 1: Please tell us how you have managed your community/organization contacts in the last month?
Summary
Contact input is done in thee ways. First contacts are bulk imported from Excel. Second they are entered through custom profiles. Third they are managed through an existing mail systems.
Categorization is very important to reflect organizational hierarchies.
Categorization is very important in directing actions that must be done. e.g. contact donators.
Response 1
Careful separation of groups.
Members are different than other types of contacts: Members, supporters, others.
Empower membership to contact the community. Use saved searches to make it easy. Contact lists lead to action.
Profiles that match your data entry people's needs are easier to use.
Action: contact targeted audience.
Response 2
Excel and mailman mailing list.
Response 3
Translate from one DB to Excel. Merged with a public data source to create custom mailings. Sent email.
Response 4
Email and list serves. Invite and inform through contacts. This results in action.
Response 5
Filemaker pro. Track contacts and donations. Custom profiling for actions. Donations are tracked. Currently have distributed tracking of activity history across many members. Attempts at common views.
Response 6
Track investors. Very careful with data to avoid errors. Notions of payments to investors.
Response 7
Excel spread sheets.
Question 2: Describe your organization and what your role within that organization is.
Summary The documentation should be targeted at community leaders who are responsible for technical implementation of contact management.
Response 2
Progressive Populist Caucus of Texas (an affiliate of PDA). Webmistress / technologist.
Response 3
I am the webmaster for both sites and am on the board of TFD. I am also webmaster for the Tidewater Young Democrats, which has just gotten started, and will likely use CiviCRM for them, too.
Response 4
I am currently Chair of Fair Vote Ontario (membership approximately 1300). I am also providing technical IT support, while other people manage email lists, webmastering, and updating our membership list. It so happens that I am also assisting in migrating our website from backend cms to civicspace cms.
Response 5
Founder, manager and volunteer coordinator/communications director
Response 6
Research director, but technical roles. Also volunteer
Response 7
Web/tech admin. THe org is a local community organization in Philadelphia, PA. About 300 members.
Question 3: Who currently enters and updates your community/organization's contacts?
Summary
Contact entry is a collaborative effort. There is regular entry, usually done by people with that role, and periodic batch entries by leaders.
Response 1: I do currently, however, we want to empower our regional folks to do this in the future.
Response 2: Secretary. A signup sheet is passed around at our meetups and events and that is all entered into an Excel spreadsheet.
Response 3: The Executive Director. I assist with batch quarterly/semi-annual updates of riding info for each contact.
Response 4: data volunteer (both)
Response 5: We have an office assistant who handles mostly clerical and data entry tasks, including maintaining the database. Other staff members access the database and sometimes enter information as well. Some of of those non-database tracking systems include:
- Each staff member keeps a separate list of email addresses in his/her email client.
- We have a web-based "message log" that staff in our office use to record phone messages.
- Visitors to our website register to receive email bulletins.
- Our executive director keeps a personal list of major donors, foundation contacts, etc.
Response 6: The people in the membership committe.
Question 4: What tools do you use today to manage contacts?
Summary
The most common tool is Excel, both for data entry and as a data intermediary from other sources. Filemaker pro is the next most popular solution. Requests for integration with Mailman is also popular.
Excel, contact manager, mailman. Filemaker, Microsoft Access, Custom DB. PHPMyAdmin
Question 5: What works with your existing contact managing tools and what does not?
Summary
What works: People have learned the existing systems and can produce targeted lists. Able to track donations and see some activity data.
What doesn't work: Contacts are not integrated with other contact sources. Contacts are not integrated with applications. Some usability issues still remain in generating targetted lists.
Response 1
I know the contacts are managed successfully when a novice user has the ability to locate their target group, export the data for their own use without help of an administrator.
The only limitations with the current contact manager is the inability to generate custom profiles and for the various modules to specify a source of contacts to use. That's been difficult.
Response 2
Pretty much everyone knows how to use it, also mail merge functions. Not much else, though. 
Response 3
Terribly time consuming. Web not integrated with membership or contact list. Some problems sending mass emails from Outlook reported by Ex Dir. phpList is not used really since too complicated for Ex Dir. What works: simple uses of Microsoft Office applications, since they are known.
Response 4
We are still experimenting...too soon to know what works well-Our contacts should be precise- like target mailings...good sorts and specific interests- with feedback loops built in too bulky and creaky; need to be an expert to get what we want out of it. Need user-friendly formats and mechanics. We'd like to be able to sort and contact by specific task and interest;
Response 5
We're able to store and locate addresses of our donors, subscribers, media contacts. We know how much each donor has given, and we can select lists according to various categories (mostly location and interest) when sending out email appeals. We're able to run an email list. Right now one problem is that we have multiple information systems that aren't well integrated. We'd like to be able to send out action alerts and track responses. We'd also like to enable people on our contact list to contact EACH OTHER, without violating their individual privacy.
