Björn
Yeah hi everybody. I think it's it's good to see um how well that many people got together for this, for this event. I think it's a I think it's a first for Civi to do this online thing. And um I think I was a bit critical but it seems to be working just fine.

I think my comment was out of focus. Yeah.

Also I think it's great to see that our communities can come together on, like a cause like this as well. I think it's a strength as a community that we have. Most of us, if not all of us, do have some sense of the common good obviously otherwise we wouldn't be working in this area.

And so I can I can sort of show you a little bit about an extension that we created like two months ago, already way into lockdown. So we were a bit late but the idea was to facilitate matching people that offer help, and people that need help.

Actually I've prepared a couple of slides, let me know whether that works for you. Can you see those or is that you know you can say right?

Rose
Yeah. It's all good.

Björn
OK. So so why did we want to do this. So actually this wasn't our idea. There was a client who came up with it and said we're overwhelmed. So there are a local organization and they were trying to connect people within that town, actually Hamburg.

So it's it's quite a big town and they were kind of overwhelmed trying to figure out how to sort of range and sort of match all these people offering help and and requesting help.

So just a couple of slides, a couple of like general points, obviously a crisis like this can affect people in a lot of different ways.

Obviously the main one is medical but that's not something we can help up with but a lot of the things that can happen to people have have quite severe consequences as well. Even if it's not medical. Point being a doctor might be locked up maybe they're quarantined maybe maybe there was a different I want to go out because I mean tested positive and they wanted to go out because obviously that don't want to infect people and that could get people to a lot of trouble especially if they don't have a person that close by, which in nowadays happens more often than not I guess, especially in bigger cities.

So the idea was, and I've seen that in my neighborhood, but like people like putting up flyers on lampposts and stuff. But for this to be a little more organized it was a good idea from that organization that was talking about that, I actually invited them to come in here today to present themselves but they couldn't. But so to do this on a bit more organized larger scale it was a good idea for them because they already had a big database of local helpers and then it's a lot easier to contact people and sort of have like a concerted effort to organize this help. So it's just a couple of ideas of how to give you an idea of what kind of needs there are.

I'm pretty sure most of you are familiar with the idea. And so you can't go shopping anymore. It's a problem. You have a dog.

You need to – the dog needs to be walked, not even to mention that the psychological implications of being locked locked up alone. I mean obviously most people helpless, they hopefully weren't, but being locked up for four weeks on end and you're alone is quite challenging. I mean, so how do we help those people? Ideally it's based on the community because people from the same community, from the same neighborhood, basically the most most motivated to help the neighbors out. They know, they know the area, they know neighborhood.

And also if for example, somebody would want help stopping by people that live around the corner it's different, it's a different story than if they were sent from I don't know, three towns over. So the idea is to ideally match those people on.

We'll get into this later.

But like ideally there would be from the neighborhood that's why that solving this problem of those people in need needing help by sort of finding people who can help out in the close community, I think it's the best approach to this problem. And as I said or as I put on the slides as well I think some of them might even be bored. I mean we had a lot of – when the schools went into lockdown here – a lot of the pupils put up these kind of flyers because they said basically we can't do anything so just as will help you out. And I do believe that these kind of mutual help relationship might might persist even through beyond beyond the crisis. I think it could really strengthen the community as well.

So why would you want to use Civi for that? I mean obviously most people in here have something to do with Civi one way or another but it's for me was a good match because if you already use Civi then it's pretty much just installing the extension. It's if you already have a local supporter base and it's pretty easy to get the word out or you can do it like send out an e-mail blast to all the people that you know and for you it's it's easier to spot fraud, and I'm, I'm using the term fraud here and like.. It is not. Yeah it's a bit mean, but I can see it happening that people try and abuse the situation. And if you don't have an eye on that the whole thing could fall apart. You lose credibility as an organization. So it is support to keep fraudulent users at least in mind. I think that being said if most of the users are already known to you, then it's fairly easy to address this problem. If you if the local organization doesn't use CiviCRM, well it's a good basis anyway because all the kind of follow up that needs to be done beyond sort of matching these people is tracking what how how it went and all these things. CiviCRM has a million options for doing that and it's actually that that's what it's made for. So it's – even though it's a big system it's a very good match for what needs to be done after the match as well. Plus ideally if you start using this way, you can hopefully keep this contact database for a long time. Obviously you'd have to get people's consent. But I can really see that working in your favor in the future.

How does it work? Actually pretty straightforward. The extension provides an offer of help and the request help form it with the public. Like you just send out in an email or publish somewhere and then what happens is the contact I forget matched because we don't want to create a lot of duplicates. Ideally we want to to match this data input in to an already existing contact ideally.

And if they don't then then you create a new one. So that's the one thing. The other thing is that you need to do geocode the address because as I said ideally we match people who live close to each other and the only way of doing that is to basically have a service look up the geocode the coordinates of an address and that's basically it. So that's how they help people get into the system with the, with their needs and the requests.

And then it's a pretty straightforward thing. There's an algorithm that helps you pair these people up. So the algorithm considers help types. So you could use the extension to define various types of help, like shopping, like walking the dog, or whatever. Or you could just basically use it as general help.

But if you have defined different help types than people who offer or request help can decide which kind of help they need or could provide. And this way you try to match obviously according to that. Also the physical distance and also what comes into play here is that you can have as a helper, you can have, you could be helping multiple people. And the algorithm considers that as well. So that you don't just somebody has to provide help some people just live in the center and the ones on the outskirts wouldn't.

So there's a kind of a balance there. And the next step would then be up to the algorithm, it sort of suggests pairs of helpers and helpees, is to somehow confirm that match. And I mean you could do it automatically as I wrote. But that's kind of risky because anyone who would sign up would could be matched to to a person that is actually already in need of help. And we want to kind of avoid that meaning being any kind of abuse of cases. You could also do it manually but that's kind of a lot of work. And I think the way to go is something in between. But that really depends a lot on your data structure and your organization. So that that's probably nothing we can sort of provide by default. But it's something to think about.

And then as a third step basically you just communicate.

But once you've confirmed the relationship between those then you could just use CiviCRM's facilities to just send out an email or whatever you want in order to connect those people and send them mutual addresses or something like that. And then what comes after this is kind of beyond the scope of the implementation of the, of the extension. But it's something that you have to think about obviously because just with that matching it doesn't mean, you have to think about what happens. You want to know how when you want to process complaints, you want to know when it ended because if people don't tell you that you're free to help somebody else again at some point then you not going to be assigned anymore anymore requests, so yeah I think that's basically it.

If that sounds interesting to you join me in Room 5. And yes we can we can talk about the details and I'll give you a quick demo of how it looks like. As I said I think they're quite happy with it. I have no idea since we published the extension. I haven't gotten a lot of feedback from other people so I don't really know how many people are actively using it but it'd be good, to be good to get some feedback from using you guys anyway.

Yeah that's me.

Nic
Great. Thank you so much. That's brilliant. I have no idea if my video is coming on screen at the moment but I will just use this moment to introduce the next speaker. Louisa Peters from Leeds in the UK. Thank you so much for that Björn. Sorry, one moment.

Louise
Oh I'm here. Can you hear me all right? Yeah. Okay good.

Okay. I haven't gotten a slide so just kind of got look at my face I'm afraid, but I will for the workshop – I do have slides for that.

So, so I work for quite a small community charity in Leeds in the north of England. And when we went into lockdown our local government body, our local council basically commandeered a range of charities across the city to become an emergency hub so we could deliver things like emergency food packages, go shopping, doing the medication deliveries all that sort of thing.

So we were given hundreds of volunteers in one big lump very quickly. And our challenge really was how to to manage that many volunteers. We were already using Civi as our client database, and we did already have, you know, a group of volunteers on there but nowhere near this number. And and also managing the logistics bit like what Björn said of matching people up to the referrals we were receiving from the council,  people who needed help, with the volunteer who's gathering to go and do it. So we installed CiviVolunteer onto our database as a little extension. As I said because because we all use it we could then log all our shifts on there, we could advertise it really easily out to all our volunteers. It's the first time we've used it and if it's been a Godsend really to be able to coordinate sort of the logistics of of so many people, and, and keeping track of them as well, and monitoring things like the finances for shops and just knowing who's going where and picking up what medication, that sort of thing. So it's it was really really good.

So my presentation I'm sort of going to talk through how we did that and sort of how it looks on Civi and then the realities of it, the pros and cons of of CiviVolunteer, because there were some limitations on it which should be great to overcome because it could do some amazing things to manage really large groups of volunteers. And we're going to be. We've been told by the government here that we're going to be doing this for until at least December. So yeah, it's a really great tool if anyone else out there needs some sort of a way to manage those logistics of all your volunteers and and, and getting them signed up to do different kinds of help. Then yeah. I think it's really great tool. I'm going to be in room two and I will have slides at that point as well so you can see what I'm talking about.

But that's my bit. I don't need to say any more.

Nic
That's brilliant, thank you thank you so much Louisa. I'm just, out of interest how many different blocks of work have been sort of booked through it, just to get some sense of this scale?

Louisa
How many? Yeah we've done Oh it's been over 200 referrals in the last six weeks. So yeah if we didn't have something to manage it, it would have been would have been a nightmare. Because the council sent us a nice spreadsheet you see and I didn't like that so.

Nic
Grand. Okay well that sounds a brilliant session. Thank you. I'm going to move on to the next session, which is going to Calgary Canada now, to the Alex and also looking at the management and coordination of workers. But this is paid workers.

And I'm gonna go over now to Geoff Peters. Sorry, Geoff Webber. You're Louisa Peters. Let me change the… Geoff.

Geoff
Hi everyone. Greetings from Calgary. Trust everyone can hear me. Just the disclaimer.

While I am talking about Civi. I am new to this community so thanks for having me and I very much technology challenged.

And so I work with people not computers. And so if anything this is an advertisement on how someone like me can use Civi.

So I do have some slides, so I'll share these and trust, maybe people can give me a thumbs up if they see the slides showing up on their screen – yes. Perfect.

So working closely with Karin who I think is people are familiar with in Calgary. My role is on a social director of community and social initiatives with Alex Community Health Center which is a fairly large nonprofit in Calgary. Calgary is a city of about 1.2 million people.

If you're not familiar with it you're probably familiar with Banff just down the road, National Park, and it has a whole host of programming and health and social services for vulnerable communities. And so we have a wide range of programming.

It's quite a large non-profit organization, primarily it looks at primary health care but it also matches that with social programming. And so every year we have specialized clinics for youth, community and seniors. We also have housing first programs that work with chronically homeless people and then we also have a lot of food and educational programming and wellness programming paired in there.

And so the crux of that looks like a pretty robust organization that largely brings people together in groups. And so, to eat, to take groups together, mental health supports basic needs supports you name it we were already using Civi in 2018. We made the decision to go paperless.

We moved into a big building and that's when we started looking at Civi as a way to track and store all activities especially on the social side. So we have a medical recording but everyone who interacts with the Alex typically interacts first with social workers, peer support workers, community advocates you name it. And so every clinic had their own way of doing things and so in 2018 that shifted and we started to use Civi and our Covid response really accelerated how we use Civi and we'll talk about that more later.

So to give her insight into the Alex programming we have over 60,000 visits a year. We have over 16,000 clients or community members that we work with, across 15 different clinic types or programs. We use Civi and we'll get into how this works, to record information obviously about how people come but also to to ask questions and get information about how their lives are improving. And I think when we get to our breakoutroom Karen can talk about that a bit more, and that's all going through what we refer to as a client dashboard.

So every client has a unique I.D. and they get their own dashboard assigned to them. And this is what that looks like. So you can see in the background on the top header there that's the that's the safety component.

And then this is, where my mouse is is what all Alex staff, and there's about three hundred and fifty of us, this is what we look at.

So when someone has an interaction if they come to the Alex or supports say at our community kitchens, or our health centers you name it, everyone's dashboard looks like this and we can record a wide array of supports, everything. Medical, social referrals or we can create activities and you can record activity in any of those categories, and so it's quite, it's quite intuitive and user friendly. You can get demographic information from people which is really helpful. So age, kind of the social determinants of health is essentially what we're trying to try to understand for the people who access our services, and then we have a calendar option, and I'll talk more about that later.

So here's an example. I didn't talk about how the Alex has health busses that go out into communities.

And so here you can see an example of some activity types that we collect you using our dental health bus. So we often go to schools or areas where people aren't accessing dental supports and so there's there's kind of some deserts in the city. And so we'll go to those areas and you can see the different activity types on our dental bus for example. And then each of those colors that are kind of posted there represent a different activity type so you can actually can you can map and understand and get insights about the kind of services we're doing across the city. So we were rolling along with city and then and using it across all of our clinic types, all of our social supports, and then Covid-19 happened, and I guess that's the meat of what I want to talk about. So obviously the idea of getting people with fragile and complex health needs together in a room like the rest of the world couldn't exist anymore.

So we developed all the social staff across the agency a collaborative way to bring supports to people where they live. And so we kind of coined that 'social dispatch'. And the idea would be you'd call into these phone lines, we'd have our staff working on the phones and then we would assess how we would support you, that could be mental health social supports but also basic needs so hygiene medicine and mostly food supports, we have we partner and have a community food center which it has a big community kitchen. And so we were able to create food kits and grocery kits for people. And so now you're talking about working with staff across sites, coordinating getting, coordinating getting support and resources to people in the community. And so we stopped doing our in-house programming. So there's an example that Karin threw in there of how usually we'd have lunch and social programming is for people. But that stopped obviously in April and we had no onsite supports.

Everything became either virtual or we supported people by bringing them you know basic needs to their homes. And so this is an example of our our Community Kitchen is that top photo in our community food centers that bottom photo photo they kind of got re- reimagined into a basic needs and hamper production site and a call center. And that bottom photo is as an example of the kind of meals that we started to make for people and deliver for people. This was envisioned at a time when we were looking at pictures of like Italy and stuff and we thought OK well we need to make sure that we're supporting people staying home.

And so over Covid, the Alex has helped over two thousand unique individuals with over 7,000 meals. To put that in perspective I could eat three meals a day for the next 20 years. So there's not a lot of food that has gone in the door. And there's some, some logistics involved in this have been the ability to create a calendar in order to schedule delivery on the day assembly and delivery of food hampers out to people in in the community. And so to do that we created a scheduling feature —and I say we, I mean Karen— created a schedule featuring calendars and daily reports lists as well as task teams. And so the teams could be the people who work at a certain center. The the the scheduling task feature allows someone to be on the phone with someone, take their information including their address, and then schedule for a delivery of a hamper to that person and then the person doing the delivery would just have to complete the task and then automatically all that information gets stored. The calendars are great because you can schedule things in advance, so as the word got out and our phone lines got quite busy we were able to schedule well in advance and able to schedule at times people for a phone check in or a food delivery at a time that worked for them. We also got daily reports which was created which was really helpful because it allowed us to print off and see let's say if we're making 20 grocery kits or hampers, see the commonalities across them, so flag allergens and that kind of stuff. And that was helpful for not having to go in and buy one to create hampers individually, we can kind of create multiples at a time and so we got our efficiency created as we went. This is the back end. A little bit, of what our task teams look like. So you can see our different clinic types. So those little CHC, YHC  that's our community health center, a youth health center and you can kind of see how you a staff member can belong to different teams and so you can configure your calendars pretty creatively as you need to. So we're moving fast. I know. I have a lot of information to get through.

Scheduling a task. And so this is what that looks like. So you can have a client and you're going to sign it to a person's a person's calendar so that that is helpful in the sense that this person's dashboard that original slide that I showed can then be dropped onto a calendar with information that you are going to that you want to grab right and even down to the activity time and useful for Covid. If we had to contact-trace or understand who interacted with who at a certain time we would be able to go back and grab that. You can also drop out details that would show up in the calendar which is a great feature and I'll show you that next.

So this is just without backup. Looks like – so once you schedule something you can see that it gets logged in the back end intensively. Here's how you'd get to a calendar. And so one of the nice things is it's it's mobile friendly – so you're able to on your mobile device. This is what it looks like on your calendar and you can click on the activity type to hit a scheduled activity and complete it. And this is what this looks like once you click on the activity type so you can see the date, subject, you know this this link goes there Alex I.D.

And if you wanted to update or correct or complete the task you can just do that very easily on your phone, so you can imagine the drivers are delivering stuff, can easily follow kind of the line of travel assigned to them. This is what a calendar looks like across the whole team so you can see all the other all the identifiable information has been taken out but you can see how a team's calendar you can assess and see what's kind of scheduled and what's being completed and you can see up to five calendars at a time. And I know this was important if you're trying to figure out who's where at any given time you can detect that, and you can also obviously configure this many different ways to include the information that you wanted on the backend.

So this is that 7 a.m. report you could get a printout of all the information you needed for what was happening that day what you needed assembled in the activity details you can put dietary restrictions or food restrictions that kind of stuff. And yeah you're welcome to join. Karin, I will join, but Karin will be the one you want to talk to in terms of how this all transpired because she is the one very much who put it all together.

So yeah.

Thank you for it for having me and I hope it didn't run long.

I'm not sure where I'm at for time.

Nic
That's brilliant. Thank you so much for that Jeff. That's that's awesome. Yeah there's a lot of sessions I want to see and Joe was just asking in the chat if the aim is for the sessions to be recorded and yes each session will hopefully be recorded and shared on on Civi page as soon as as soon as they've been made ready and uploaded to YouTube.

OK. So we've got to move onto the next speaker and this. This is Eric in New York. Let me… There we go.

Eric
OK. I think I'm really excited to see all of the creative solutions that people are building out of Civi. A lot of inspiring ideas. So to talk about Flatbush United Mutual Aid and and our use of CiviCRM. Let's see if I can share my screen correctly.

Always great when tech people really don't know what they're doing.

So Flatbush United mutual aid is a small ad hoc organization that formed out of neighbors trying to help each other during the crisis. Originally the, sorry, wanted to get a different tab running, originally when the group formed another neighborhood was doing a similar mutual aid project and the folks that were working there handed over some code to the folks who were starting Flatbush United and it was all based on proprietary systems.

It was a very kind of interesting, automated system that takes calls through voice over IP system. Those all get dumped into a proprietary system which is AirTable and then people would manually pull things out of that, call people, find out what they needed. Put that into a Slack Channel where somebody else would change an icon manually on the Slack message to indicate that they they were taking on this delivery or something and at a small scale it would have been great.

But you know a Covid is a global crisis. The US is the worst hit nation in the world. New York State is the worst hit state within the United States. New York City is the worst hit within New York State and Flatbush is one of the worst hit neighborhoods in New York City.

So the need was overwhelming.

We had thousands and thousands of calls that weren't being processed. So the idea was to bring in Civi in order to coordinate all of that. I'll go into a lot of the details in the breakout. But to give a quick overview there is a web form, the web form when it's filled out creates a civic case. And then those cases can be tracked and assigned.

As we were building this out, the folks who were doing the real work realized that the model that we were building which was a very individualized thing where one person was requesting food. Another person was going to the supermarket buying that food and either delivering it themselves or handing it off to another person who did the delivery. And that system was able to handle about 20-30 requests a month –a week.

In the three months since Flatbush United started we have delivered food to more than 600 families, and this is an entire volunteer ad hoc no organization behind it funded by neighbors sending in money. Four hundred of those deliveries were in the past three or four weeks since we shifted to a Civi-based system. And with that I will talk more later about the decisions of what we –actually one last thing this system is currently built on Drupal 7, and it will be moving to Backdrops CMS. Working on Drupal 7 was a very intentional decision because of my own political views about sustainable software. And. I think there's a lot of interesting discussion to be had in the Civi community of where our focus is lie and what it means that. A lot of really talented folks have been chasing Drupal 8 for 3 years.

And what could where we could be now had that not happened but that is again my own perspective, because what I'm seeing in the Mutual Aid Networks that are arising is none of them are going with Free Software. What we're doing in Flatbush is unfortunately unique right now. And I think that. Is unfortunate.

Having been in the Civi community for about 15 years I just think that we need to rise to the challenge that Lobo laid down before us. And I'm gonna do my best to do that. I'm now going to hand this off to the folks who are doing the real work. And I'm not sure Jake or Amy which one of you wants to take this on? Now you jump in.

Jacob
I can speak quick to say I do not have a tech background whatsoever. I have a food background.

And so during the first like opening months of the crisis when we're figuring out our systems we quickly realize that the peer-to-peer grocery shopping method was just not going to work in any way shape or form to address. We had a backlog of almost 2,000 requests in the system before we shut down our phone lines, and in the time that our phone lines were shut down we received 23,000 requests for food, for assistance and the vast majority of those were for food. So my background is in food systems. I we decided to switch over to a bulk buy model where we work with wholesalers and local farmers to bring produce in, and a bunch of other Mutual Aid organizations in Brooklyn sort of made a similar move at the same time. But there was definitely a tendency towards a lowest common denominator system of switching to a food pantry model, where every family got the same bag of food, same size bag of food, regardless of need or family size.

And we made a really intentional decision since we were giving up a highly personalized-like grocery shopping system where we went to the store and bought exactly what the neighbor wanted for food, that we needed to come up with a way to sort of preserve the human dignity of our system which presented us with a ton of challenges.

And kind of - and so what it ended up being was we were going to need to keep a sort of like an inventory of food things that we were ordering from, from farmers, or from wholesalers that our neighbors could shop from. And then in addition to that still allowing for a certain degree of customization. So everyone who gets groceries from us has the option to add extra items to the lists like diapers or dog food or you know diabetic medicines and foods and stuff like that. And that's for us has been like a really big point of pride that we're able to meet people where they're at but the logistics of that is, is, is absolutely daunting.

And originally the idea was to go with – we were going to have a Google Form that people filled out. And it was very very quickly became obvious that that was like not a safe way to do things and not an effective way to do things. If we was going to be able to meet you know it was maybe half or so we needed.

And Eric and the tech team were able to come up with using this if you saw him with his intake form, with a way to do the data outputs where we could create inventories, create order forms. Create packing slips for volunteers, create delivery instructions, create like Atlas mapping data that we could use to develop routes for our drivers.

And that's that sort of that's what translate completely transformed the way that we were doing our intake and the way that we're reaching people. Like you said we have the majority of the people - I think it's it's actually closer to 500 families that we've served in the last four weeks through this system. Our intake volunteers have gone from maybe being able to complete between 2 and 4 requests per 3 hour shift to you know 10-15 sometimes.

And in and, we're doing all of our intake, is being done on three days now. We're used to take six at least six to seven days to reach the same like the same number of neighbors contacted.

So it's and it's been absolutely huge for us. Our costs for groceries have also gone from between 90 and over 100 dollars per family to under 50 for the week while simultaneously also increasing the amount of food that we're able to get to people.

So having having this tool has been like incomparably important to what we're doing. Amy do you have anything to add to that?

Amy
Hi I'm Amy and I'm also not very tech savvy but I've come at this from an intake perspective. I I train our volunteers to be able to communicate with our neighbors and talk to them about their needs. And so. The impetus for this tool really came out of a desire to better serve our communities with fewer resources and be able to serve more people. And I had noticed that our intake retention rate was extremely low because of the stress involved of posting an individual shopping list to Slack, and then having to constantly check back in to see if a delivery volunteer was picking it up. And a lot of times they would forget to change the status. That was very frustrating on the part of the delivery volunteers and I would notice we're also geographically located where a large, we're in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn which covers quite a bit of ground. But then we also border neighborhoods that don't necessarily have other mutual aid groups. And so we were trying to honor those requests as well. And, you know, trying to get a car go quite far away and then only deliver one, to one family, was also part of this impetus.

It was really about where volunteers, helping volunteers in this case, helping neighbors in this crisis. And how do we use our resources more efficiently, that's it for me.

Thorston
May I ask a short question to Eric?

Eric
Please.

Thorston
Yeah. Eric You once mentioned the term case several times. So I'm just I would like to find out did you also use CiviCase as a basis for?

Eric
Oh all right. That's interesting. Yes we're using CiviCase and CiviVolunteer and at first the idea was to use CiviCase because we were doing a very individualized shopping and delivery and things as Jake said we're getting lost. And as Amy said they were getting lost in the system, somebody post something to Slack no one would respond to it, no one knew that no one had responded to it. So the idea was to start case tracking so we could at least make sure that everything actually got responded to.

Thorston
Okay yeah. Thank you so much. Interesting that. Hasn't been used so very often right CiviCase. It's fairly new I guess.

Eric
Well the new version is well the new version is relatively new it's it's it's nice that the data model is clean. I've been very happy with it. Great.

Thorston
Thanks. See you later. Thanks.

Nicol
Thanks very much Eric and Amy and Jacob sorry I'm simultaneously trying to figure out how to earn a spotlight video while thanking people. I'm not very good at doing two things at once and it's true what you said at the start – tech people trying to use a tech tool that is relatively new to us. It's its own sitcom.

And we're now going to move on to the final session for this initial round which is about using CiviCRM for crowdfunding and peer-to-peer fundraisers. And for that I'm going to bring in Alejandro from iXiam, and I should also just mention we owe a great debt to Alejandro and iXiam for providing us with the technology for today, their the zoom accounts and host accounts. Thanks again. So thank you.

Alejandro
Thank you Nick and thanks for the intro. And yeah it's been a pleasure to head to this great initiative.

And yeah I have a couple of slides and also have something to demo but it will be quick because we'll be doing the breakout room number one, and yeah I mean. So we are well iXiam, a CiviCRM consultancy based in Barcelona in Spain. We've been around. Yeah I think that we are. There was more than 10 years I've been working with Civi, so we are really happy to keep contributing to the project, and and so we received some — we've been chasing this feature for a while before Covid-19. Some of our clients, which are NGO charities of different sizes and different countries, were already asking us to do something similar that you know Facebook does with birthdays and and other commercial platforms.

So we wanted to bring these alive but we never had you know time or resources to finish wrapping this up and this Covid-19 situation kind of pushed us to to finish what we've been chasing for some some months and actually what it is it's a it's a solution or are a maybe a a way for using Civi using one of the already features that Civi has. But for a specific purpose let's say which is helping organizations to do a peer to peer fundraising.

Sometimes it's you know called or overlap with crowd funding. Hopefully we'll be able to explain a little bit the differences between crowdfunding and peer to peer or other fundraising techniques or approaches. So, yeah I mean obviously this crises  push organization to maybe adapt or change a little bit ways that they were doing traditional fundraising using traditional channels like face to face or telemarketing, because well because of the lockdown. You know people are not more on the streets and maybe they don't want telemarketers to be calling them. So for their fundraising sector this kind of changed a little bit the rules. Yeah, well we will get into more detail in our demo and we are tight on the schedules so I will be very quick but yeah they're these crisis changes the rules of fundraising and  everything that it's online is now being prioritized over traditional channels.

So yeah mostly charities or organization. We're already doing an online fundraising but a situation needs to push this organizations to be more creative, or try to do more online stuff over traditional channels. So this brings to peer to peer fundraising. I guess that most of you are familiar with with a concept maybe some others know and sometimes there's a mix between peer to peer and crowdfunding.

Both are fundraising techniques but their special thing of peer-to-peer is that a type of fundraising, that persons, individuals from outside the organization actually act as fundraisers for the organization which they are not fundraising. They can be donors or part of their constituents so and this, it's a technique of this type of fundraising actually for these moments of crisis actually has a lot of of interesting things because obviously you the community gets more involved because you invite your friends, invite your families to fundraise for your organization.

So this is an excellent approach to keep within fundraising budgets and trying to cover what you are losing, organizations are losing from other traditional channels. It has also more advantages of awareness or getting more engagement with your donors or your constituents.

So CiviCRM has a very a nice feature that actually allows to perform peer to peer fundraising. So we will be explaining a little bit how you can set up a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign.

We have our online demo to see how it can look like. And it's actually, so the feature in CIviCRM, it's called Personal Campaigns for all the ones that don't know this, it's already there it's extremely powerful.

It's extremely interesting and it has maybe some work to do on the front end on how you present these campaigns through there to the visitors to your work visitors. But once you can sort this out it it looks very very nice. And we've been doing some benchmarks with other commercial platforms that offer this service to organizations. And I can assure that it it's very very similar to what other platforms can offer. With a difference that this is open source. We don't charge any fees to our clients and their organization don't need to pay a fee for the money that they are getting, and all the benefits for using open source and see DRM. So actually this is how you can look like this.

This is a demo website but an organization can have different projects that they can be fundraising for. Each project in Civi terms, it's a contribution page. We will get into the details, but let me show you a little bit.

When you enter a project you can, the organization can offer the possibility to donate directly to the project which will be traditional fundraising with our contribution page where form you can allow our visitor to create their own campaign a personal campaign so they can create a personal campaign.

Three very easy steps.

And it can be published in this project under the umbrella of this project. Then when someone gets you to the page you can get into their personal campaign and you can donate to the personal campaign.

So actually you are contributing to the organization, to the project, but you are also contributing through the personal campaign of someone that you trust, someone that you trust and that it's extremely easy to use, is very user friendly and with a little work on the front end that we've been doing we've been doing with through Drupal and the technology that we that we use. But you can have a very very powerful platform for doing a peer-to-peer fundraising. And we will get it, we will see the details.

We'll explain you how to set up and show you the reports, how everything then in CiviCRM is connected so you can see the organization, can see all the money that is coming in, to from which person that is running the personal campaign, to which project. And again it's a very very powerful feature that is there. Sometimes it's like a hidden jewel that is there but with a little work on the frontend you can be extremely powerful and it will allow organizations to run a peer-to-peer fundraising raising, that it's a trend that it will stay for I guess a long time. Yeah especially after this crisis.

So, in the demo we will explain, yeah all of this, some concepts of fundraising. The demo will be led from my with my colleague Carolina, which is one of our senior consultants, but also has a first degree in fundraising, so she actually is an expert on the matter. So it will be very very interesting.

So it will be kind of a yeah it will be a very practical demo. We will be showing these these slide. We will get into CiviCRM, explain you how to set up, and how to to run these type of campaigns, and so I guess that we are on time. Our demo will be there room number one. So if you are interested in peer-to-peer or all the fundraising initiatives just come to our breakout room. Thanks.

Nic
Thank you. Thank you very much Alejandro, that's fantastic. So that's the five sessions. Now I'm just going to hand it to Dana Skalman in New York, who will just give a few words about the session that she is giving is in addition to these five. We also have Rose, as she mentioned, is doing an introduction to CiviCRM and also Dana is doing a session so just one second.

Dana
Hello everybody I'm Dana. I'm just going to, yeah we're just going to review some of the WordPress stuff we work on our organizations we work with are translations and member based organizations and they're trying to integrate the information and the WordPress. So I'm just gonna basically go through a demo and highlight these seven I guess plugins and the various things they do like you know sync their member status, that you can give people, people to a group and Civi and then that syncs to a group in WordPress and that gives them access to private content and so on with Caldera Forms you can create a Form that does event registration, membership registration, opens a case, creates an activity. Et cetera et cetera. Go through some of that with the CiviCRM event organizer plugin you can have a event listing on your website that syncs and talks to Civi for registration, and then that too if you set it up right with a redirect you can have Caldera Form views instead of a profile so you can have complex event registrations that tie into an event page. And then lastly the last one is the newest one which is kind of still very beta but it's it's an integration with a plugin called Advanced Custom Fields and that is mapping to a WordPress, in WordPress you can have content types kind of like post pages you can create custom content types and those content types tie into entities and Civi and then those custom fields can be mapped. And that ties in actually to events as well as that which works well for you know member directories.