Useful CRM notifications by email
How do you keep up with important but infrequent developments in your contact relationships?
The information is in your CRM, and you could easily find it by performing a search, running a report, or even putting a widget on your dashboard.
But will you remember to check those every day, week, or month? Even if those reports are usually empty?
Many of my clients find it's easier to pay attention if they just get an email that only arrives when there's useful information to display, such as:
New subscribers to a given mailing list in the past month.
Recurring membership payments that failed yesterday.
Donations over $1000 in the past week.
A donation from a first time donor, just now.
They're doing this in one of two ways:
CiviRules extension:
CiviRules can be configured to handle a wide variety of automated tasks. Having it send you an email when a first-time donor gives is just one of them.
Scheduled Jobs to send reports by email:
Instead of just getting a single email from CiviRules every time something happens, you can have CiviCRM send you the contents of any report, by email, on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis.
It works like this:
Create a report that filters for the data you want, within the last X days.
Add your email address as the recipient under the report's Email Delivery tab.
Configure a Scheduled Job to email that report on your chosen schedule (daily/weekly/monthly), and to include the full report data either in the email body or as an attached PDF or CSV file.
Use the No Empty Report Mail extension so that you only receive emailed reports when there's actually useful data in the report output.
With either of those two approaches, you can get email notifications from your CRM when there’s actually data that matters to you.
This way you don't have to remember to search for that information — which is hard to remember on a regular basis, especially when there's usually nothing in the search result.
Here's the thing:
Creative use of core features and extensions in your CRM becomes really valuable when you can get clear on the predictable answers you'll need.
If you can do that, it's worth a little effort to configure notifications that will be meaningful in your work.
All the best,
A.