Hi,

We're a church based in the south of England and we've grown from 35 to 80 members within 4 months (not bad going). We're looking to setup the admin side of the church and be able to create mailings lists etc. I've now installed something 9 scripts on website to give them a go and the annoying thing is that each one does 1 aspect of what we want as a church.

Basically we're looking for the following functionalitiy:
1. Log all church members Name, Address, Phone number, Email etc.
2. This information to be accessed by any of the leaders/staff at the sametime and from any machine.
3. For us to group poeple into families so we can enter spouses details and kids details.
4. For us to be able to allocate people into groups. For example people might be part of the worship group or finance group etc.
5. To be able to mail merge all or certain people within the church via email.
6. To be able to mail merge all or certain people within the church via post/word.
7. To be able to print off a church address list in paper format.
8. To be able to store notes etc about the people.

I've found a company called http://www.churchworks.com/ who offer this in a package. It loks ideal and seems to do what we want. The only problem is price - £20 a month! We could never afford anything like this! Their demo found at http://www.churchworks.com/popup/Vid-WhatIsCW.html is very useful and shows what can be done.

What are the chances of creating something very similar and integrating it to a part of out website?

Thanks for your help.

Just your average simple CRM (Customer Relations Management) system would do what you have outlined as your needs.

Not rocket science by any means , provided your site has server side code and databases available.

Really?

Can you suggest some of the ones your refering to of have experience with? And how much will they cost?

Do you think that £20 a month + £9 for SSL will be paying over the odds and avoidable?

Our website has those capabilities yes =)

Thanks

P.S. Sorry for posting the links - is that not allowed?

links that are actually relevant to the thread we will live with

£30 a month is probably ok if you need ALL the features it offers AND are going to make full use of it. For what is little more than an address book it would be certainly OTT.

SSL isn't essential unless you are handling financial or sensitive personal data.

What code and db can you run?

Chris thanks for your help. You're being very kind and helpful.

I think we need to think of the budget as being a high priority in this sort of thing. The church is a not for profit group and doesn't have spare money to spend on things we don't need.

I've given the church free hosting space and created them a website www.livingwordchurch.org.uk with it being a new church and very small (currently) I've just had to work every hour possible to try and help get things done.

Do you mean: MySQL, CGI, PHP etc when you ask that question?

Here's a screen shot of the host so you can see what's available:



Pretty much everything isn't there?

looks that way

Take a look at FireFly CRM never used it, but it seems to do everything you need and the software is free. You pay for setup and customising should you need them to do it.

Are these sorts of things things you can customise and change field names etc?

It'd be good if we could modify it so suite our needs and style it to the way we need.

Are there others which you've used? Any that you would suggest trying or reccommend?

Thanks

The only CRMs I have worked with were desktop applications, Commence and Goldmine which integrated into Outlook/Exchange as their datasource.

The only "website" one I've dealt with was a basic ASP one I wrote for a client which was deployed on their LAN.

Just looking at the code for this app and it seems pretty straight forward to deploy, just needs .htaccess setting to parse .html as php, and create the database and tables (phpMyAdmin import file) change the images and colours to suit your site, ftp the files up and bob's your uncle

I'll probably install it myself and have a play with it later in the day.

Hi Chris,

Did you get firefly working?

I've uploaded and installed it but it won't work =(

Thanks

After seeing the thread, I installed it on my local machine.

They did not make it real easy to install. Did you edit the config.php.template and rename it to leaving off the template part?

Did you create a .htaccess file to parse html as php?

Be sure to put this in a directory that you can password protect later if this is going to be on a live server.

Will try to answer any questions you have if Chris doesn't.

I don't see any file called config.php.template in my download, but I edited the crm_connect.php-template in the connections folder and renamed it without the template.

Could you recommend how I write the htaccess file?

I've got everything upload and I think set up, except for the htaccess file, and all I see is a blank page. And firefox is trying to force me to save the index.html page instead of opening it.

http://www.livingwordchurch.org.uk/crm/index.html

I appreciate any help!!!

No, didn't get as far as installing it.

it's on the todo list though

html parsed as php

http://www.webmaster-talk.com/php-fo...tml#post765860

whoops, the post above that one

Thanks for the link. That fixed the problem with the page trying to save itself. It's still blank though. hmm...

http://testcrm.ourhosts.co.uk/

setup a MySql DB & user and import the crm_firefly.sql into with phpMyAdmin.

edit crm_connect.php to setup the database parameters

this line need editing to suit

PHP Code:

DEFINE("PHORMATIONIMAGEDIR", "http://.../images" ); 


and the header images and text can be edited in the same file.

up and running in a matter of minutes.

I hope they don't charge a lot for the install and setup

Chris,

I am running php5 and for some reason the form is not writing to the DB. I manually added a couple of groups and they show so I know it is connecting to the DB.

Ops you both are Chris. Well you both need to know that anyway.

I am running php5 and for some reason the form is not writing to the DB

Aye, I just found that out a few minutes ago as well

the user I setup for it has permissions to add records in phpMyAdmin, but not from the script, so a bit of investigation needed

Thanks for all that guys!

I'll take a look at it and see if I can get it working.

Let me know how you get on with the problems your facing.

Too many Chris' hey! lol

Oh might have spotted a problem with this CRM for our usage.
For our church we need it to the following:

1. Log all church members Name, Address, Phone number, Email etc. TICK
2. This information to be accessed by any of the leaders/staff at the sametime and from any machine. TICK
3. For us to group poeple into families so we can enter spouses details and kids details. NOT SURE
4. For us to be able to allocate people into groups. For example people might be part of the worship group or finance group etc. TICK
5. To be able to mail merge all or certain people within the church via email. TICK
6. To be able to mail merge all or certain people within the church via post/word. DOESN'T LOOK LIKE IT
7. To be able to print off a church address list in paper format. DOESN'T LOOK LIKE IT
8. To be able to store notes etc about the people. NOT SURE
9. Export the database. NOT SURE

Can it do the above? Hmmmmm.

Thanks

Originally Posted by chris_elevate

Oh might have spotted a problem with this CRM for our usage.

Hang loose. I am convinced you can do better than 20 pounds a month.