Wish List: Civicrm 1.7

Is there any way to configure repetitive events. We are using civicrm in our Alumni community www.stanislites.org Herer are some feature wishlist:

1. Repetitive events: configure such events

2. Use the Profile -> Birthday of members to create a Birthday event, again repetative with an option to remind other members via an email. Display either to the group or to the Public.

3. Profile form at http://www.stanislites.org/?q=user/register : Our list of groups is huge and growing. Would like to see a drop down list of groups.

4.  Same as above but an option to choose a drop down instead of a multiple choice box/buttons (Alumni Profile->Alumni Type and Alumni Profile->House

5. Groups: we have organic groups and civicrm groups -> better  functionility or convergence of the two so that I do not need to have both inmyprofile form

6. Most webhosting companies offer unlimited email addresses.Create a lifetime email address based on profile at the time of "creating a new account" In our context (say)name.graduationyear@stanislites.org this is basically a forwarding mechanism to my real email address which cannot be viewed by others if theywish to contact me or withinmyprofile.

Something that would help with deployments that require complex permissioning (i.e. political orgs) .  It would be great if the process of assigning users to roles allowed definition by more than one group membership.  i.e. ACL role "district 1 editor" assigned to contacts in group "district 1" AND in group "district editors".  This would eliminate the need to create twice as many groups as there are districts. 

Also, given the above scenario where many people have access to edit records it would be useful if there was a workflow for accepting changes.  A simple "automatically send all changes to membership coordinator" function would be a good start.  An approval queue would be even better, but more work to implement. 

What would be really helpful for us would be to have the contribution tab on individual records display year to date and to have annual totals instead of or in addition to the long list of individual contributions. The year itself should be configurable to reflect an organization's fiscal calendar.

 Even better, in combination with the improvements to searching as mentioned above, would be able to search based on those annual totals. Such as the famous lybnty:

 That would be: give me everyone who donated in the last fiscal year but not yet in this fiscal year.

Currently. I maintain a separate table with anual totals that allows me to get this but it requires submission of a separate sql job. 

Event management feature sounds great!  Looking forward to using this.

For events, we would not want to depend on PayPal...  a bit flaky for large sums.  (Lots of horror stories about their suddenly deciding for no reason to close your account, with your money frozen.)

Integrating with a grown-up payment service would go along with this feature.

WorldPay would be a good choice: easy to integrate with, excellent reputation, can do recurring billing (important if you are also doing subscriptions), and handles numerous currencies (a requirement for my organization, although probably not a common one).

CiviMember - Date Ranges. Can these become a configurable option? The Start and Join dates now go back 20 years in 1.6 but I still need to modify it.

In case anyone needs to mod, join dates, you can change the prior years supported in the New Membership form by changing this line in CRM/Member/Form/Membership.php:

  $this->add('date', 'join_date', ts('Join
Date'), 

  CRM_Core_SelectValues::date('manual', 3, 1),
false );

CiviMail Improvements from Email Marketing best practices.

(1)  Add a token that links back to the HTML version of the mail.
"*63 percent don't provide a link to an archived version of the message on a Web site.*You can never be completely sure recipients actually see your email messages as you intended. Hosting your newsletter, offer, or announcement on your Web site provides a second chance and may be a step readers are more likely to take, over whitelisting you or changing their email client's default settings to read your message in full-screen or with images. A side benefit: You can track clicks on the Web version to see who opens your email in addition to reviewing (notoriously unreliable) open rates."

(2) Add a token that allows the email recipient to click and add their address book. Not sure if vcard or hcard format is most likely to be able to be a "one-click" solution. Display text for the token should be something like "Don't miss an email. Add <address> to your address book."

"*65 percent don't ask to be added to recipients' safe-senders list or address book.*Most email clients won't block email from a sender listed on the recipient's personal whitelist or in the address book. Whitelisted email also appears with properly rendered images."

(3) Add subscriber "control center." User should be directed to a page that allows them to change their primary email address at a minimum. They should also be able to unsubscribe and opt out via the web page. Would be great if you could add a profile or custom fields to the control center. Basically this allows you to collect CRM data by by-passing the User Framework. This one probably needs to be discussed a bit before we settle on the right implementation. 

"*45 percent don't provide a link to update profiles or change addresses.*This practice gives the recipient an option other than unsubscribing from your list. Over 30 percent of subscribers are estimated to change their preferred email address annually."

"*82 percent don't offer readers an email administration center in their messages.*You can tie up many deliverability best practices outlined here into a neat bundle by using an email administration center, a standard list of essential information that includes these items:

• • E-mail address the message was sent to (helps with unsubscribing if your page doesn't automatically load the address)
  • Contact information: company name, street address, mailing address, telephone, email address, and phone number
  • Unsubscribe or profile-update link
  • Link to privacy policy or brief privacy statement" 

Slight addition-- Email forward a friend token.

Implement this so the user goes to the HTML version of the newsletter on a webpage. At the top of the web page, the user can add the emails of the people that they are forwarding to.

CiviCRM creates a new record and records the forward as an activity in the new CRM record.And of course, send them a copy of the email with a special forwarding header:

"XYZ thought you might be interested in this email. If you would like to subscribe to future emails, click here" 

A petition module should be great. CiviPetition or something.

Whe're a Belgian organisation for Democraty (democratie.nu) and sometimes there are petitions we have to handle. Petitions from other organization, other country's or own petitions. Now it's much work to handle it so we limit the quantity of petitions, if civiCRM can handle this, that would be great.

• -email verification
• -captcha
• -"one click" signature (if people are logged in joomla/drupal, their contact information from civi will be used for signature)
• -export/import DB
• -multiple petitions categories, ..
• -...

Thx,
Denis

Civicontribute adapted for Multi-Organisations.

I could be wrong but I understand this option is not properly available yet. (We have multi site already as well as more than one project to contribute to. What about more than one organisation?)

Were you set yourself up as an umbrella organisation and then chanel funding to more than one smaller startup organisation and they can look up what their organisation have received say for the month.

This will enable the new trend of collabortion between specialist-organisations to give a more complete package of services but also give the opportunity to GROUP fundraise for a combined project between the organisations in a specific location say in a suburb..

This is something LONG on my wishlist and something that we can definitely use where a lot of organisations do not have the capability to fundraise on the internet here in Africa, where all this different orphanages trying to care for the orphans in the present Aids Pandemic here.

It would be very helpful if Tags in CiviCRM could be structured like the Taxonomy terms in Drupal!

term 1
  - term 1.1
  - term 1.2
term 2
  - term 2.1
    - term 2.1.1
    - term 2.1.2
  - term 2.2
etc.

Memorial (honor) donation handling is very important to us. "In honor of" donations need to be listed on honoree page, as mentioned above. If contact is deceased, it should be changeable to "In memory of". We also need a separate thank-you/receipt to a family contact, which could be handled with a relationship I guess?

I don't know how common this is, but our development office has a typology that they call the hierarchy. We're a school so the hierarchy goes:

Trustees
Parents
Staff
Alumni
Grandparents
Former Parents
Former Grandparents
Friends

 The like to have a table (in the annual report and at each board meeting) that shows total giving by hierarchy.

People can belong to many of these groups, but for the hierarchy they are assigned to whichever one is highest on this list at the time of the GIFT. Obviously, people move up and down over time so over 40 years, someone may have made contributions as a parent, trustee, former parent, grandparent. So, the hierarchy group at the time of the contribution needs to be maintained, not changed when someone changes groups.

Right now, what I have done is to add a custom field in the contribution so that each time a contribution is entered or edited from the backend the hierarchy level can be assigned. (and of course donors don't actually know they are in these groups) But, what we really want is some way to take the current hierarchy group from the contact and permanently connect it with the specific contribution or to make that information available when exporting/reporting contributions.