Data Maintenance Made Easy: New CiviCRM Extension Provides Personalized Links for Emails

Americans were already feeling less secure about how their data was being handled before recent data-breach announcements. Writing for Forbes, Nelson Granados argues that Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica crisis “has struck a chord around the world because it signals the potential for social media platforms to abuse their privileged access to user information.”

That’s why we’re excited about a new CiviCRM extension that makes sending emails with personalized links to view and update contact information easy. It’s not just social media platforms that are or will be in the spotlight. Nonprofits, for-profits, government organizations — pretty much every organization that has even a basic CRM system should be thinking about the data they are collecting and how it can be made more secure and available to individuals, should they come knocking. All organizations in the EU are getting ready, thanks to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which, among other changes, provides people with new rights to access the information that companies hold on them.

With the new Contact Checksum extension, built by Matt Wire at MJW Consulting, CiviCRM users can easily view within the UI of a contact record customized URLs to include in an email. This allows people to easily view and edit pre-filled contribution forms, profiles, webforms, event registration forms, petitions, and more — all without having to be logged into your system. This not only saves people time in taking action, but it also allows them to view and update their information. When they make changes to any pre-filled or empty fields, those data are automatically updated and stored within their CiviCRM contact record.

Let’s take a look. To access the personalized links, install the extension and go to Actions > Contact Checksum.

From there you will see a pop-up with examples of the Checksum links you should use for contribution pages, profiles, and webforms. Examples will display both for emails you send out of CiviCRM as well as emails you send from an external email system, like your Gmail account.

This functionality isn’t new to CiviCRM, but you need to know quite a bit about how tokens work. The extension puts the format of the link directly in your hands. All you need to do is copy / paste and update one piece of the URL. Let’s break the links down to find that piece:

Within the Contribution page link and the Profile page link above, you will see “id=1” and “gid=1”, respectively. Each Contribution page and Profile page has a unique ID. For example, this client of ours has several donation forms on their website that direct to specific programs.

• General Donation Form: https://uwcnm.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=2
• Young Leaders Society Donation Form: https://uwcnm.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=5
• Women in Philanthropy Donation Form: https://uwcnm.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=7

If you look at the end of each link there is a different ID. To send a prospective donor to the right donation page, make sure to take note of that form’s unique ID. The same applies to profile pages. You can access all profiles by going to Administer > Customize data and screens > Profiles. In the fifth column on the Profiles page, you will be able to see the unique ID for each profile you have in the system.

For Drupal systems, personalized links to webforms are more straightforward. Within the contact Checksum URL example (https://yourwebsite.org/webform-url?cid={contact.contact_id}&{contact.checksum}), you will just replace “webform-url” with, well, the URL of your webform!

Whether directly from CiviCRM or from your external email system, this feature gives you a simple way to keep your contacts’ information up-to-date without needing to create accounts or a login area on your website. This also keeps you from asking your contacts to complete a cumbersome multi-step process to view and update their data.

Next Steps

If you like what you see, download the extension and learn more about how the Checksum token works. There are many other ways that links like this can improve your target audience’s access and efficiency in taking action. We’d love to brainstorm with you on how your organization could benefit or work with you to add this feature to your system.