Civinews CiviCRM Newsletter Registration

The CiviNews system is a module and a component for the CiviCRM system. Together they:

• Show the minimum fields for signing up for a CiviCRM eNewsletter in a module position on any Joomla page. This makes the signup substantially easier and promotes more newsletter registrations.
• Optionally redirect the newly registered user to a Thank You page or to a page (generated via the component) that lets you thank the user and ask for more detailed contact information such as physical address and telephone number. Since this process is optional, it won't frighten people off from joining the newsletter, but lets those people who want closer contact with your organization to provide additional information.
• Optionally redirect after providing more information to a final Thank You page.
• Works in Joomla 1.5 with CiviCRM 3.x versions, and with CiviCRM 4.x in Joomla 1.7

All users who sign up via the CiviNews process are added to CiviCRM as a contact and associated with any group chosen in the module. Use different modules on different Joomla pages to target different groups and eNewsletters!

Details of Building a CiviCRM Contact

Contacts are added to CiviCRM in two stages. First, the CiviNews module prompts as for a user's name and email information.

When these are supplied, and the user sucessfully answers the Spam Questions, the system creates a CiviCrm contact and associates the contact with a CiviCRM group. 

For e-Newsletter registration, special contact lists, certain events, etc. this is all that is required. If that is the case, the module can either return a successful registration message right in the module, or the user can be redirected to a Donate page, a Thank You page, or some other page of information. The Redirect Link is set individually for each instance of the CiviNews Module, allowing it to be used for different purposes with different CiviCRM Contact Groups.

Often non-profits and other kinds of organizations would like to try and solicit the phone number and mailing address information when a user joins a contact group. To thank the user and ask for more (optional) information, build a menu link to the CiviNews Component, and paste that fully qualified URL into the CiviNews Module. When the user reaches the CiviNews Component page, he/she is already registered in the CiviNews Contact Group. If the user chooses to exit the page without providing any additional information, then you still have his or her name and email address. If the user adds more information, then after submitting the data, you can optionally redirect the user to a final page which has more information.

CiviNews Uses

CorFun created CiviNews because we have noticed a substantial drop in the eNewsletter registrations for customers that we migrated from Acajoom to CiviCRM. CiviCRM is a fantastic system, and does great newsletters, but the simple Acajoom Registration module would capture literally hundreds more registrations per month on our non-profit sites than the CiviCRM page. After researching what was happening, it became clear that users were clicking the "Get Newsletter" button, seeing the CiviCRM page, and then getting out without registering. The CiviNews module corrects this issue, and allows users to sign up in a module position.

While the module's primary function is for  eNewsletter registration, it can be used for anything. The module will prompt the user for his/her first name, optional last name and email address, which are the only fields necessary to create a Contact in CiviCRM. Contacts created by the module are added to any Contact Group desired. After getting the basics, you can even ask for more information if the purpose you are getting the information for requires more information. But above all, the module gets you the Name and Email address, helping you get contact with a new potential supporter or member.

CiviNews is designed to be an inexpensive, module-based system for gathering newsletter registrations. If you need more "Lead" functionality, including thank you emails and internal notification emails, then please click here to learn more about the CiviLead module and component!