How can I track donor movement on CiviCRM?

Question

Our organization is using CiviCRM on Drupal and I'm looking for a way to create, track, and report on solicitation plans -- essentially, having a report that forecasts income from a variety of channels (individuals, events, etc) It would track details such as channel (ie individual), ask amount, likelihood, etc. Ideally, this report could be integrated with a contribution report to compare forecast and actual income.

I think a modified CiviCase might be able to handle the solicitation plans, with customized reports, but I'm hoping someone might have more concrete solutions or know of an existing module that can handle both forecasting and contribution reporting.

Answer 1

You could do a workaround using custom fields.

If you create a custom fields on contribution, with two values: Real and Budget. You then make Real as a default value, to work for your contributions.

Whenever you are forecasting, you create a contribution with the value Budget. You could then select for yourself on which detail level to forecast on. But if it is important to distinguish channels, ask amount, likelihood and receive date (maybe pr. month), then you create aggregate contributions for each distinct values, and the custom value Budget.

You then need to update all your contribution reports to select only Real. And then you could add some with Budget, and display them together in the dashboard.

Or you could probably make custom reports comparing Real and Budget. But at this point you might be considering to have a reporting program (not CiviCRM) making reports on the CiviCRM-SQL-database.

Answer 2

It is not entirely an answer to your question but you would probably be interested in the extension CiviRules that is being developed. Check: https://civicrm.org/blogs/erikhommel/civirules-sprint-january-and-march-2015 and/or http://redmine.civicoop.org/projects/civirules/wiki

Answer 3

I would recommend checking out two tools:

• The Advanced Fundraising Reports extension is similar to what you're looking for. You can compare numbers of donors in two time periods and show a trend.
• The Summary Fields extension isn't directly relevant to your question, but sounds relevant to your use case.

If you'd like to get more sophisticated than this, you may want to talk to Veda Consulting. They've done some very clever work integrating business intelligence tools with CiviCRM.