CRM

Drupal has many useful ways of creating, organizing, tagging, grouping, searching, and securing information. These tools make Drupal an ideal platform for native contact management functionality, with very little custom coding required!

This has several advantages over using a separate program or third-party service to host your contacts:

• Self-updating and self-identifying contacts: Users can update their own contact information using a familiar interface. More importantly, they can tag themselves with skills, interests, and other information you're not likely to collect elsewhere. Contacts also identify themselves through their use of the site: What groups are they subscribed to? How active are they? Which RSS feeds are they interested in?
• "Big picture view" of your contacts: Imagine sending a letter to "all members who have donated at least $500 in the past, have participated in discussions about deforestation, and have not visited the site for 30 days". A fundraiser's dream! When your contact records are stored offsite or trapped inside of another data silo, it's not possible to search and segment your information this way. When your participatory information is tied to your contact and ecommerce data, you can segment in new and powerful ways.
• Rapid adoption of new technologies: Because Drupal has such broad appeal, new features are constantly being developed and improved. Geographic searches, RSS feeds, media tools, mashups, import/export, mailing solutions, and other new technologies are added to Drupal as fast as they're invented. And, of course, the Drupal community maintains a watchful eye on security and performance improvements overall. Rather than worrying about how to keep up with all of this, a Drupal native CRM tool can focus on finding ways to get more out of your contacts.

Getting from these nuts and bolts to a full-blown contact management tool takes some new thinking, a lot of tinkering, and a leap of faith. This module is a "formula" module, which glues together some content types, pre-installed views, and other handy Drupal tools to assemble a viable CRM solution. It's similar to an install profile, but it can be used with any install profile or pre-existing Drupal installation.

At a minimum, you'll need these other modules:

• CCK
• Views