Fast Action Links extension A love letter to CiviCRM Perfect together From: Jon Goldberg To: CiviCRM

I Love CiviCRM This community is amazing. I love seeing the amazing work people are doing facilitated by it. But let me show you something I don’t like. Hi everyone! My name is Jon, and I LOVE CiviCRM. I love this community, I love knowing that my work is helping great people do great things, and I love developing Civi. One thing I don’t always love though – it’s using Civi as an end user. Let’s talk about a reason why.

Application Review Process I organize a salon with two other folks. Attendance is free – but by invitation only. Want an invite? We have an online application. Civi is great for setting up applications via profile webform, Drupal webform, Caldera webform. However, the application review process is terrible. I organize a monthly salon. Attendance is free, but you need an invitation. We have an online application and we get about 30-40 applications a month. Sounds like a perfect job for Civi. From the application side, Civi is perfect. But let’s look at the review process.

Why is this so hard? Review a list of applicants, put them in one of 3 buckets. Accepted – 1) Add to an “Accepted” group. 2) Remove from “Applicants” group. 3) Send a welcome email. 4) Register for upcoming salon. Rejected – 1) Add to a “Rejected” group. 2) Remove from “Applicants” group. 3) Send a form rejection. Need more info – 1) Send a form email. LOTS of my clients have had similar workflows. I want to look at all my applicants and put them in one of 3 buckets – Accepted, Rejected, and Needs More Info. I want to take the actions listed on this slide for each of these groups.

Review process – step 1 Pick out my accepted group At first, it sounds easy. Search for your applicants, check off the Accepted folks, [next slide] add them to the “Accepted” group.

Review process – step 2 Add them to an “Accepted” list

Bzzzt - wrong! It’s almost impossible to search for someone who’s newly added to the “Accepted” group. To send JUST them an email, you either a) need a temporary group or b) a pad of paper. Well, not so fast. There’s already people IN the accepted group, and it’s almost impossible in Civi to search for folks newly added to the Accepted group. Not completely impossible, but overly complicated. So to take multiple actions on my newly accepted folk, I need to create a temporary group. I asked one of my co-organizers, and she said, “Oh, I write the names down on a Post-It Note”.

Review process – step 2 (actually) Add them to a “temporary” list But even if you do it MY way, then you’re adding them to a temporary list,

Review process – step 3 Search for “temporary” folks Searching for the temporary list,

Review process – step 4 Add them to the Accepted list Adding them to the Accepted list,

Review process – step 5 Send them a form email Send them a form email

Review process – step 5 continued Send them a form email More clicks to do that,

Review process – step 6 Register them for the event Still more clicks to register them,

Review process – step 7 Remove them from the Applicant group Remove them from the temporary group

Review process – step 7 continued Remove them from the Applicants group More clicks

Review process – step 8 Remove them from the temporary group And finally remove them from the temporary group.

Review process – step 8 continued Remove them from the temporary group And now we get to do this for the other two buckets! I’m a Civi expert, and this is the best I could come up with. 8 steps, each step is 3-10 clicks, and I do it for 3 different groups every month. That’s tedious, and complicated, and if I’ve lost you by now, good! My point is that this is way too hard to do. Bored yet? We still need to do “Rejected” and “Needs More Info”!

What we really need: 3 simple buttons Here’s what we need! Three buttons, directly in the search results. I press one button per contact, and that one click does EVERYTHING I need.

That’s a lot of work. I’m a Civi developer, so I could take 4-6 hours to do this. But it would only work with MY groups, MY emails, etc. What we need is a way for non-coders to make their own links to streamline THEIR workflows. Writing THAT extension is 60-70 hours of work. [read slide] Now I love CiviCRM, but I don’t want to come home from a long day of working on CiviCRM at my job to do this in my spare time.

I’m (f)unemployed! I could go to the beach, adopt a pet, take up new hobbies. Or….I could spend two weeks of my life writing my “love letter”. Guess which one I picked? But I recently left my job doing CiviCRM! So guess what.

Introducing: Fast Action Links That screenshot I showed you a few slides back with the three links? That’s a real screenshot from my extension! Let’s take a quick look at how it works.

Adds this menu item When you install it, you get this new menu item, “Fast Action Links”.

Familiar Civi feeling It brings you to this screen, which lists your Fast Action Links. Note that second column, “Search View”.

Don’t clutter normal searches This is one of those features that’s been around a while in Civi that not many folks know about. In Advanced Search, you can choose what fields you see in your search results. The Fast Action Links are tied to those views so we don’t clutter normal searches, and so you can have multiple sets of links for different workflows.

Creating/Editing a Fast Action Link Creating or editing a link is easy! * You select the text for your link. * You select a Search View to attach it to. * You select an action to take. There are some basic ones like “Add a Tag” built in – but the real power comes from integration with the CiviRules extension. Any rule you can build with CiviRules, you can fire with a single click. That lets you use ALL the CiviRules actions, including multiple actions at once, and even add conditionals. * The rest of these options are to make the experience intuitive and pretty for the end user.

One click per applicant – not 30 Now, my co-organizers press one link, and ALL the actions associated with that link happen automatically.

For developers Links are a full-fledged entity with a full API. You can create custom actions – but better still, create them as CiviRule actions so both extensions benefit! [read the slide]

What’s next? Add Fast Action Links to emails! Create a Facebook-like event email, where a user can click a button IN THEIR EMAIL to RSVP for an event, answer your one-question survey, etc. [read slide]

Share the love! Have a use for this extension? Talk to me about it! Thanks for listening! I want to hear about your use cases – come find me and tell me about them! Thanks for listening!