Drupal Customer Relationship Management (CRM) recipe

Hi Ressa,

Thanks for the issue. There is already an initiative called Member Platform that you can find at https://www.drupal.org/project/member → .

I am going to move this issue there from the Recipes Initiative project for better visibility and discussion.

Thanks @thejimbirch for moving my suggestion to the Member project, that's probably a better place for it.

Thanks Jim!

@ressa I'll quickly invite you to join #member-platform and #crm on Drupal Slack.

Could you please share your motivation and interest in your proposal?

There are some efforts underway and would love to get you plugged in!

Thanks @jdleonard! Though I am not using Slack ...

My interest is mostly that at the moment, just an interest: I'd love for Drupal to offer a first class CRM, to remain competitive, while gaining yet another edge over other CMS'es, both proprietary and Open Source.

I have the same approach for some other Drupal projects -- I may not be using them at the time (Simplenews, WordPress Migrate) but see great potential for Drupal overall, and a future point where I could use them myself. And that actually happened a few times.

Currently I am using CiviCRM, which works well. But if I ever need a CRM for another project, I would prefer to use a Drupal recipe, or module ... I have very limited experience with recipes (they are quite new), and am still not sure if using recipes is a good idea for a Drupal driven CRM, over a module ... like, how would you add new features, and upgrade them in the future, if it were to be recipe-driven ... ?

I am subscribed to all issues in this project here on Drupal.org, so I'll follow along, and read your previous discussions, where you look at recipes -- and as soon as there is anything available to try out, I'll surely give it a test spin, and try to help make it happen!

"CRM" is universally understood to be an abbreviation for "Customer Relationship Management", and someone looking for a CRM is much more likely to use the word "Customer" not "Contact" ... so I wonder why the title was changed?

https://www.drupal.org/project/crm →

That link does not explain the change.

This issue is not about managing Drupal contacts, it's about creating a Customer Relationship Management system in Drupal.

Clarify that this issue is about a generic Customer Relationship Management system, not Drupal contacts.

If this Member Platform project is aimed at managing Drupal contacts, maybe this issue does not belong here?

My first instinct was to agree with @ressa.

CRM = Customer Relationship Manager. This is a well established term, like CMS.

However, CiviCRM refers to itself as a "Constituent Management System".

We could argue that semantically, "Contacts" is inclusive of "Customers", and so it is an expansion of the concept.

Although this only changes the intended purpose, not necessarily the feature set. A full suite of standard CRM tools would work for customers, constituents, and contacts.

Good thing those all start with C!

(I asked GPT for clarification/ideas: https://chatgpt.com/share/681a1f4d-bea4-8011-a184-9865b72e7b78)

That says it's ok to bend the C, and also suggested Community Relationship Platform.

Thanks for weighing in @mortona2k, and sharing your thoughts.

Though, please don't focus too much on CiviCRM ... I only used that in the Issue Summary, since that's the only "Customer Relationship Management" system I have tried :) I could just as well have used one of the other systems, which collectively share the trait, that they handle data for individuals or businesses, and offer relevant tools.

My point is simply that, like you also stated: CRM is well established as meaning "Customer Relationship Management", so we should use that as well in Drupal, to make it clear for outsiders what it is, and also to make it discoverable, if people search for "drupal crm" or "drupal customer relationship management".

The term CRM is definitely overloaded. While the C typically stands for Customer, I have also seen it commonly stands for Constituent or Contact as well. Regardless of the terminology, CRM aims to be a base for CRM implementations.

Member Platform is adopting and contributing to the CRM → project. Member Platform's focus is on providing the tools that membership organizations need. CRM will be the base for much of that functionality.

CRM's core is module-based. Member Platform likely will also provide some modules. In my mind, either/both projects (and definitely also other projects built on top) would provide recipes on top of the core modules. However, it is a non-goal for either project to be entirely recipe-based so as to facilitate upgrade paths and, at least in CRM's case, to facilitate a shared core which many different use cases can be served.

But to the question of whether should there be recipes to spin up a CRM: yes, absolutely! I think those will come in time.

I'm going to categorize this as a Support Request, move to the CRM project (which is perhaps the more appropriate location for it), and mark it as fixed, but others feel free to tweak my changes as you see fit.