Staff Conference Reports

Part of the effort to encourage our staff having continued education, they will be attending one-two educational conferences per year. Below are the reports and notes from these conferences.

2016

CiviCRM Summit

Location: Washington, DC

Dates: September 21-24, 2016

PSF Staff Present: Ewa Jodlowska, Kurt B. Kaiser, Mark Mangoba

Report from Ewa Jodlowska

The CiviCRM Summit was a worth while conference for us to attend. We were able to see what the new version of CiviCRM has to offer and see if it can be applied to any of the processes we already do and/or want to do. Below are my notes from the training and conference:

• CiviCRM Admin Training (1.5 day course)
  • - Dashboard can be customized by user - Employer field connects relationships w/ organization

    - When using PayPal w/ CiviCRM have "use billing address" and go to profile>form to make sure the fields match PayPal's fields otherwise it may throw the zipcode or name into the wrong field - Has mailchimp and sendgrid integration through extensions - Subtypes may not be a good idea in organizing your database - Smart Groups can be a specific search that you can re-run. You can also apply mailing list behavior and other types of actions to Smart Groups. - Groups are mainly used for mailing list groups and they keep subscription history. - Tags are used for simple tracking, esp. for imports, to store short term data as a flag, there is no history on tags, using a tag will tag the entire organization that the person belongs to - Relationships within Civi are completely customizable, % is wildcard - Activities helps track - can setup future activities - Civi has custom fields and profiles (aka forms) that are completely customizable - Mailings: could send mailings to groups, when setting up mailing, "unsubscribe group" field tells where someone's opt out will be stored for future mailings - Contributions allows groups to have their own pages and stand alone links (this is what PSF uses for fiscals) - Membership: Mark and Ewa discussed doing a view only API from Civi -> pydotorg. Civi has an extensive API tool to help. - Events: could be used to track board meetings possibly? Could create a template event for board meetings and use that to track attendance better so we can report on it once a year. - Mail: possibly use to email previous PyCon attendees when future PyCon registration launches - Import: works great, especially when email blasts are needed. We would import registration email this way to send email blast for reg launch

• Crowdsourcing and Fundraising, conference session
  • - Had ability to add thermometer and honor roll / scroll (more for fundraiser) - Personal campaign pages can be used for PSF Fiscals

    - Use "webform CiviCRM" to create contacts for campaign leaders so you can set permissions. Setup as members to create action of one time use password. Possibly could use funraiser/campaign pages for PyCon Financial Aid and possibly one for PyLadies Auction - Vanity URLs -> Drupal Path Module - has ability for XML feed to accounting system and has ability for tagging accounting - CiviCRM Entity 3.x will have Drupal Pages and forms (which was written by presenting company) and could be used to show data elswhere through viewform. Maybe viewform is what we can use to display membership on pydotorg from civi (note for Mark)

• Email Deliverability & you, conference session

  • - avoid failed DNS, bad reputation, spammy links, spammy content. - check SPF file through mxtoolbox.com and it should contain all domain for sender and where it is being sent from (such as pydotorg and psfmemberdotorg)

    - CiviMail has SMTP config - has bounce reports under mailings that should be checked regularly after mailings - sending mail from @python.org from CiviMail may not be a good idea since the domains don't match it would be caught as spam (to check with postmasters) - check out mail-tester.com before sending email blasts

• Keynote from Wikimedia
  • - A/B testing for emails - Thumbtack ABBA - Segmentation of lists
• Balancing Customization, conference session

  • - High impact & low effort tasks should be main goal for customization tasks - High impact and high effort are typically the tasks that require customization - need way to determine if to move forward and how - Using CiviCases you can customize many high impact and high efforts so they turn into high impact and low effort tasks - CiviCases is a blank slate for customization and can be done through admin

• Non-profit payments, conference session
  • - The company who presented specialized in non-profit payment processing. - They negotiate better rates on your behalf if necessary - They can set up flags for better security - They integrate with CiviCRM - They have ways to tag payments

Mark Mangoba

I attended the 1.5-day User and Administrator training at the CiviCRM summit. Some key topics at the training included, Installation and Configuration. I learned that Drupal is the preferred content management system due to its relationship with CiviCRM. Although, there are alternative options such as Wordpress and Joomla, Drupal holistically has integrations without plugins into CiviCRM. I also became more familiar with extending CiviCRM using profiles to create forms. Ewa and I foresee using profiles and forms for grant tracking and keep track of sponsorships. The CiviCRM trainers also gave us support resources, such as accessing the wiki, downloads page and learning how to contribute to bugs/issues through Jira.

Kurt B. Kaiser

As detailed above, the Training not only provided a useful introduction to CiviCRM, but suggested a number of best practices. In my case, through some hands-on training, it exposed me to several Civi modules that we are not currently using. We also went through report generation and database import procedures. Sidebar discussion with the session leaders was useful, and covered

• Best practices for upgrading CiviCRM
• Use of CiviCRM in a multisite configuration to support development and staging into production
• Use of Aegir in a multisite environment, with the possibility of supporting independent Civi instances for our fiscal sponsorees, while maintaining a single Civi codebase under PSF IT management.
• Exposure to the Civi infrastructure at github, stackbase, and the Civi issue tracker.
• Discussion of Civi timeline including Drupal 8 prospects.
• Reinforcement that Drupal has more flexible webpage development (using Views) and far better access control, suitable for multisite development.

The Summit offered a number of sessions on topics of direct interest to the PSF. In particular, how to avoid getting our mail designated as spam if we should increase the volume beyond what we are currently processing. It may be advisable to switch the Civi website from psfmember.org to psf.python.org so our SPF, DKIM, and DMARC email header fields are consistent with the domain we are using as our outgoing email addresses, e.g. someone@python.org.

• Use of nginx, caches, CDN, and gzip to improve download efficiency and server utilization

• Redundancy: SQL replication, DNS replication, backup, RAID, snapshots. Use of git to store Civi codebase and configuration. CiviVisualize.

• Payments: iATS. Perhaps we should use more than one payment processor on psfmember.org and allow donors to choose.

We also took advantage of the Washington DC location to make contact with our SunTrust representative and process new signature cards for our account and to enroll in a more capable online banking environment and online wire transfer. Ewa and I also visited a Bank of America branch and updated the signature card for our account there.