Facebook Integration for CiviCRM
Useful links
Features / Functionality
These are some possible features to consider including in the prototype:
- Add "check for Facebook link" action (button?) to Contact Summary screen. This checks if the currently viewed contact is a "Friend" of the logged in user.
- Show a Facebook "tab" on Contact Summary screen if the contact being viewed IS a friend
- Retrieve a few elements from the friends FB profile and display on the Facebook tab:
- current status
- photo
- shared Network (friends that logged in user has in common with currently viewed contact/fb friend)
- Trigger one or more Facebook Actions from within CiviCRM (probably from the contact's FB tab):
- Send Gift, Poke, Write on Wall, Message, View Full Profile
- Retrieve and display a list of all contacts in CiviCRM who are currently linked to the logged in user as a Facebook friend
- Search Facebook for friends of the currently logged in user who are in the CiviCRM DB but are NOT already linked as friends in CiviCRM
Tasks
- Get Facebook account(s) and install the Facebook Developer App
- Review the platform doc - especially API usage
- Identify the data elements needed at the contact/user level so that the CiviCRM/FB component can access that contact's FB friends data
- Prototype one or more of the features above
Steps for Facebook integration
At CodeCampMumbai we were able to integrate Facebook with CiviCRM. If anyone is interested in taking this feature further do check, http://svn.civicrm.org/civicrm/branches/codecamp/
Steps for initial setup:
1. Create an application in your Facebook account. Once do this, you will get Key and Secret, which you add this in CiviCRM.
2. Goto www.facebook.com/code_gen.php?api_key=APIKEY. Then generate token which you can copy/paste in CiviCRM Contact add/edit form.
3. Every facebook user will have to copy/paste this generated token in CiviCRM.
4. Now you will have Facebook Tab in Contact Summary. This will display users Facebook profile. Also in Contact Dashboard you can see Facebook friends who are already in CiviCRM db.
Additional possible feature:
I see our members having a hard time (and/or being nervous) about generating a token and sending it to us. They'll conflate it with giving us their Facebook password, and they won't do it.
Once this gets past the initial tinkering phase, I strongly suggest building a way for the Facebook App to post the token directly to CiviCRM.
I'm concerned about the same issue as Andrew, not only for user's secuity concerns, but also actual or percieved difficulty of set-up for the user. I get the feeling most Facebook users aren't particularly tech saavy, and many will tune out the moment they see something like 'API key.'
At this point, I suspect we're better off just letting the user provide a link to their facebook page for their public CiviCRM profile.
I agree...it's basically unusable if people have to do something this technical which other Facebook apps don't require.
Note that the facebook integration was a codecamp project and something we wanted to play with. As such it is experimental. We are not planning on putting in any more resources on this for the 2.0 release. If you are interested in pushing this forward, please let us know
Hi there, I think having Facebook features is a fantastic idea for CiviCRM. I have been impressed with it so far - and I think many nonprofits are using the social web with sites such as Facebook as a promotional tool. One of the key concepts that I think needs explaining here is that CiviCRM could be used entirely as a backend tool - with donors and volunteers not even knowing that CiviCRM is used to store information. It would only be if online registration is used that a donor/member would know about CiviCRM.
Therefore, I wonder if a different approach would be useful - similar to WordPress. When you sign up at WordPress, you get an API key. This is then entered in to your WordPress installation, and can be used on things like Facebook to integrate only one instance of WordPress. What if each installation of CiviCRM generated an API key, and therefore could be integrated into WordPress in this way? See for instance WordBook - a Facebook app for WordPress.
The owner/administrator of the instance could then publish the API key to volunteers/members/donors if they wanted to install the CiviCRM facebook application so that it linked with their organisation's instance of CiviCRM. The administrator could also then configure how much data was shared out of CiviCRM, in line with the NFP organisation's policies.
Please don't interpret me incorrectly - I am amazed at the functionality of CiviCRM and make these comments in the hope that they contribute to the development of an excellent application. I am also a PHP programmer so understand the programming implications of this design.
Please feel free to contact me
Kind regards,
Kathy Reid
Hi Kathy - It sounds like you might have the right combination of technical and "use case" background to push this idea forward "in the right way". We are in the early stages of planning for the 2.2 release - so it's a good time to get new functionality spec'd and on the roadmap. A good next step might be to flesh out your description of the "flow" a bit more (esp. for folks who aren't familiar w/ the Wordpress functionality) and post this on the CiviCRM community forum (http://forum.civicrm.org) - to get some feedback and calibrate interest.