The Essence of this Page is to Outline the tasks carried out during The Google Summer of Code Project "Integrating CiviCRM with Zapier" which was Done by Merci Mukwe and Mentored by Erik Hommel and Llja De Costa of Amnesty International.

This page Explains the requirement and basic Issues required to carry out the integration process. In the next section, we have provided examples which illustrate the integration and tests

Project Introduction


The aim of the projectis to be able to provide a means by which CiviCRM will communicate with other applications through their API calls and using Zapier as a middle Tier Platform

This Project Describes a Proof of Concept for now but the extension which will be developed will be developed as part of this project and provided for those willing to try it out. But as at now just a few technical

issues ( code) is provided.

Some of the Requirements for working with Zapier and The examples of this project are

  • A CiviCRM installation
  • A Zapier Account
  • A CiviCRM account on installation with an API key
  • The Site key of the CiviCRM installation  
  • An account of the application which CiviCRM will be required to communicate with automatically ( GMAIL, SURVEYMONKEY, MAILCHIMP etc)

There are some important aspects to know on how things work on Zapier. These are explained below

Zap

A Zap is what Zapier uses to refer to two or more applications which are connected, exchange data and communicate. A zap is composed of the following

  • Trigger Application: The application which causes or initiates communication ( CiviCRM for our case )
  • Trigger: An event which results from a situation and calls for an action
  • Action Application: The application which effects a particular task when a trigger occurs ( Gmail, Surveymonkey etc  in our case)
  • Action: Anything which is performed on the occurrence of a trigger

 Example of Trigger action pair as per the examples are

Trigger – New contribution of type Donation is entered on CiviCRM  Action --->  Send the Donor a survey to answer on SurveyMonkey by link through Gmail

More about action and triggers in the like can can be found on CiviRules CookBook

An Overview of the system integration model is shown below