What data should we expose via API?

conviojames

If you could access any data from your Convio system in an API, what would it be and how would you use it? Be specific, please, about the individual data elements. If you need to create a document because your list is too long please do so and reference the document here.

Michael

James, I'm not really sure your question is that easy to answer. It's pretty broad...

I would like to see a much more expanded set group information made available, with less restrictions on quantity of records returned, or at least, a paging capability. I've posted on this previously:

http://community.customer.convio.com/thread/1720

The idea being that we could use Convio to do any sort of interesting social networking style application and use the getGroupMember method as the call that pulls down the member list for whatever group is being used to contain that apps user list. But, because it's not possible to extract a list of group members once the group has gotten larger that the max number, the method becomes effective useless.

Tom Camerlinck

Hi,

We have an in-house built CRM-like system that our local organizers use to manage their volunteers, events, tracking and reporting. It would be helpful if we could pull in more data housed on Convio into our system when individual records are worked or as part of segmenting and searching. This includes information like donation data (at least "yes a donor" or "not a donor"), personal events (attended or hosted), personal fundraising pages (have one or not), advocacy actions taken, and open and clickthrough stats (are they opening and clicking at all). Organizers would use this data to get a better picture of the group of individuals they're targeting to become more involved with us in local communities.

We'd also like to get advocacy action information via API in order to use it in widgets on third-party sites and/or our own non-Convio CMS systems. We're currently doing this by using the Convio-supplied RSS feeds, but that is inadequate for all our intended uses.

Let me know if you any more elaboration is needed.

Thanks for asking the question

Cheers,

Tom

Michael

A couple ideas:

1: An API, or perhaps a method to the constituent API, that provides a way to write customer interactions to the contact record. This would greatly help in reporting on external actions people have taken via the API -- the alternative would be a way to create custom groups externally, and I think that isn't really a good idea...

2: A Donation API variant that allows for non-live donations. For example, if an organization has some fundraising mechanism that doesn't use Convio for processing -- Mobile Commons mobile fundraising, for example -- such an API would allow to record those donations as "Transactions" but without really processing an official donation as such. It would look like a real donation in Convio, but it just wouldn't charge card (and the API wouldn't require card information).

Seamus Leahy

Submission of a survey via API.