Groups can also be used to provide permissions in Drupal. T o find out more about groups and how they are used, read the chapter on groups and tags.
TAGS T ags are in many ways similar to groups, but as well as being used to identify contacts they can also be applied to activities and cases that have something in common. T o find out more about tags, and how they are different from groups, read the chapter on groups and tags.
ACTIVITIES Activities are a key concept in CiviCRM. Activities track interactions between the organisation and its clients or contacts at a specific point in time. While all of CiviCRM's components make extensive use of activities, such as recording contributions, event attendance, membership subscriptions, and emails, you can also create additional activity types to define specific activities that your organisation carries out, for example, training, review, support etc.
CUSTOM FIELDS CiviCRM makes it possible to collect and track information beyond what's possible with the default set-up. According to your organisation's needs, you might want to add additional fields than those present in CiviCRM. For example, as part of your event management process, you might need to enter information about dietary preferences for participants. CiviCRM lets you add custom fields to collect this data and associate it with participant records. Read the chapter in this section on Custom Fields for more detailed examples and information on how to add them.
PROFILES CiviCRM allows you to pull together sets of fields for different purposes, and help you reduce the amount of time staff spends on administrative tasks. T hese sets of fields are known as profiles. A few examples where profiles are necessary include the following: collecting information or letting people join your mailing list via online forms, facilitating event registration and getting everything you need to know from registrants, or creating data entry screens for volunteers with ONLY the fields that volunteers should see. Read the Profiles chapter in this section for detailed information about how to make use of profiles.
CIVICRM COMPONENTS In addition to these basic building blocks, CiviCRM provides what are known as components to help streamline administrative tasks related to event management, membership, sending communications, receiving contributions and donations, case management, conducting campaigns, administering grants programs, and more. Each of these components is covered in a separate section of this book. T he components are CiviEvent, CiviMember, CiviMail, CiviContribute, CiviCase, CiviCampaign, and CiviGrant. T he sections on Survey, Petition, and CiviEngage (the latter is actually a Drupal module) relate closely to CiviCampaign and their special functionality is described in the respective chapters. T here is also a separate reporting section related specifically to using reports and doing analysis on your data for ongoing evaluation of your work.
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