Integration of CMS and CRM – Preamble

As I talked about in my last post, there are a variety of strategies one can use to move data between your CMS and your CRM. I’m going to choose a few examples to look at in some depth. Some of these are examples I’ve been working with clients on, or I’ve played with, some are just examples I know about, but are prominent, useful examples to talk about. I’ll talk a bit about mechanics, and talk about strengths and weaknesses, and under what situations you might want to look at it. I’ll cover:

• CiviCRM/Drupal (with Joomla notes)
• Plone/Salesforce.com
• Using varied webforms (like DemocracyInAction, Blackbaud, Network for Good, etc.)
• Drupal/Salesforce.com
• Joomla/Salesforce.com

You’ll notice that only Drupal, Joomla and Plone are represented among CMS. That’s mostly because that’s what I know, and there is a critical enough mass for all three of them that some integration work has been done in a systemic way (the exception to this is Drupal/Salesforce – it’s only half-way systematic.)  I  haven’t included any all-in-one systems (like Kintera), mostly because I don’t think they are a good idea – you might get a halfway decent CRM, but you’ll for sure get a crappy CMS, and there is no good reason for that. Another note: I’ll talk about this in detail later, but Salesforce also includes the new Salesforce.com app, Common Ground, by Convio. From what I can tell (I’m learning a lot more fairly quickly) integrating Common Ground with a CMS should be pretty much the same process as integrating Salesforce.com.

First up, CiviCRM/Drupal. I’m choosing this first because it is a pretty interesting example, and also is an example of what I would call easy and tight integration.

Tagged as: CMS, CRM, integration, web