Best Form Option

Question

We are trying to make CiviCRM the first point of membership and payment data capture. For the last two years our organization has been using a home-grown MS Access database for data capture and then transferring it to CiviCRM manually - and the backlog just kept piling up. I started working as a volunteer with this outfit 2 months back and have been able to use contact, membership and contribution imports to clear the back-log and we are caught up now.

I have been able to convince the board and the executive team that it doesn't make any sense to do it this way and CiviCRM should be the first point of contact, membership and contribution data capture. But to avoid resistance to the change-over, they have requested me to try make the data entry forms look as similar to the current forms as possible. All the folks entering data are volunteer seniors and not particularly tech-savvy. We don't want to lose them because the new system looks and feels too new/different.

I am new to CiviCRM also (hadn't heard of it before April 2018 :-) )and learning on the fly. I would appreciate some guidance from the community on the easiest way to create forms. We are on CiviCRM 4.7.31 (migrating to 5.2.2 today) and Drupal 7. If there is any documentation on forms, I'd appreciate if you could point me to it. Your opinions/ comments are also appreciated.Regards,

Raja

Answer 1

Agree with Demerit.

Since you are using Drupal I would recommend webform_civicrm as a more flexible solution but may take a bit more reading/experimenting.

Creating Contribution pages that use Memberships and Profiles is the standard way to approach the requirement to let folk join up and pay.

And then use Scheduled Reminders so they are sent an email reminder(s) to renew using a checksum link to save them having to add their personal data each time.

Online documentation for this should help you get most of the way: https://docs.civicrm.org/user/en/latest/membership/what-is-civimember/

The only reason to use drupal_webform instead is because it enables one to modify the form more easily, add Conditionals to the form, and perform multiple functions in one form, eg membership, event, relationships and activities. These forms also work with checksums.

Answer 2

I'd look at profiles first: https://docs.civicrm.org/user/en/latest/organising-your-data/profiles/

For drupal there is also civicrm webform: https://www.drupal.org/project/webform_civicrm