Using the media database

Civicrm provides a lot of contextual help inline. You can use the small text balloons to see general help text, us this. Also they provide useful help on http://book.civicrm.org/user/.

Basic concepts of Civicrm

First of all there are contacts. In our media database we have two contact types: Journalists and Media Organisations. They can have a relationship 'Employee of' - 'Employer for'. When creating a new contact (Contacts > New Journalist/Media Organisation), you're presented with a large form with only some essential fields: First Name, Last Name, E-mail.

For journalists, you find there a field 'Current Employer', that is the media organisation the journalist is working for. Filling in this field will create a new contact of the type media organisation if not already in the database. If it already exists you will see the suggestion to select the existing contact. Of course this will create the media organisation without any further details. If you have these details you can later fill them in.

There is also a field provided 'Media type'.

Contact are only really helpful if information is provided on the areas they work on/in. For this we have tags and groups. These are basic concepts of Civicrm. Big difference between groups and tags is that groups are more static and can be used easily for instance to send out mailings and administer subscriptions to certain 'mailing lists'. Journalists can subscribe or unsubscribe to all our press releases (-General) or to one or more of the topics.

Besides Groups there are currently two tag sets available that might help in the selection of the right group of jounalists: Extra interests (for topics that are not included in the groups because they are too specialist, for instance 'EFSA') and Covering countries which are for journalists that only cover some areas or countries. Both fields work with an auto-completion form (looking for matching tags in the database or add if they don't exist yet).

Besides contact details, groups and tags, you can also add notes for each journalist. These can be for instance about issues a journalist has covered or contacts between the journalist and CEO.

Contacts can be searched by using the search form always visible on the left side of the admin bar or under Search > Find Contacts/Advanced Search. Search results can be used for all kinds of bulk actions: send mail or mass mailing, add to a group, add tags...

Create Mailings

There are 2,5 ways of sending out mails:

• select one or more contacts (for instance by first performing a search) and send them a mail. This way of sending mails is limited in features as it does not make use of header and footer templates, though you can make use of the body template. It will also not include unsubscribe links. Generally this could be useful to send a mail to a limited amount of journalists.
• Create a mailing by selecting Mailings > New Mailing
• both can be combined by first selecting contact (for instance by performing a search) and then select 'Schedule/send a mass mailing' as action on top. You will be able to use all the features of a mass mailing from there on (add groups, track reads and links...)

Steps in creating a mass mailing

Create a mailing by selecting Mailings > New Mailing

1. Select Recipients:

• Name your mailing (note that this is for internal use only, this will not be the subject in the mail itself)
• Include and exclude groups

2. Track and respond: in prinicple you can leave the default settings here

3. Mailing Content

• Select the correct From address. If not available you can create a new from Email address under Mailings > From Email address
• Use template: Select Press release
• Mailing Subject: put the subject of the press release here
• Compose on-screen. Edit the body, date, contact details...
• Plain text format: will be automatically created if left blank
• Header/footer: leave to default Mailing Header/Footer, this will add a graphic header and footer, with unsubscribe link (which is mandatory when sending mass mails)

4. Test: yes, please do send a test to your own address to check whether everything looks/works fine. Don't select a group here because it would send out a test mail to the whole group!

5. Schedule or Send: (schedule won't work yet as some functions still need to be set up). You can also continue later. You can find your drafted mailing under Mailings > Draft and unscheduled mailings.