A final blog about our Donor Journey sprint with Steinar and Helen from MAF Norge. Or I should really say our sprint on CiviCRM Trigger Action. We set out to at least create the first basic version of the engine to automatically do stuff based on stuff in CiviCRM :-) Some kind of mechanism that would allow MAF Norge to automatically move donors into specific groups once they have contributed for the first time or set up a recurring payment for example. I feel we have made a good really start on the engine, for more technical details read the previous blogposts by Jaap Jansma (jaapjansma in Civispeak). The first test was quite successfull, and going through the list of triggers with Steinar worked pretty well. As we expected we did make one of the most unsexy things ever, which is a nightmare to configure. So even though Helen and Steinar can work with it, it is not something I would hesitate to hand out to everyone...but it is freely availabe on GitHub obviously (check https://github.com/CiviCooP/org.civicoop.triggers if you are interested). Enough left on our wishlist for more sprints on the Donor Journey stuff, hopefully there will be other parties in the CiviCRM community interested enough to contribute and/or fund :-) If we manage to build on this as a community I am confident we can make CiviCRM an even more wonderful tool for fundraisers!
I want to close the week by telling you a little bit about the longer term dream that I gathered from Ilja de Coster from Amnesty International Flanders. He is a passionate fundraiser AND a passionate data miner. His dream is to be able to combine the transaction data from CiviCRM with other data sources in his datamining utility RapidMiner, do some magic analysis in to classify donors and then move it back into CiviCRM for automatic processing. So based on the donor payment history, the weather forecast, the geographical areas and age differentation CiviCRM automatically sends out a mailing or contacts the call centre with a target list. We believe that we can and will get there using CiviCRM. Using the engine we just started to create. Probably establishing a link between the donor status in the datamining toolset and CiviCRM group membership. Being part of making that dream happen was and will remain incredibly exciting! I just love CiviCRM and the CiviCRM community....:-)