Our office manager uses an older external software program for all our accounting and issues tax receipts from that program. At present, we are not using CiviCRM for contributions. We have the external program's Giving ID as a Contact custom field in CiviCRM (called 'Envelope #').

The rest of our staff use CiviCRM for all contact management in their departments, and our website users can update their own CiviCRM contact information directly from their Drupal user account. Lots of addresses could be updated, and our office manager would never know about them.

How can our office manager be notified of any mailing address changes for only people with Envelope #'s? That way, she can change the address(es) in the external software and send the receipts to the correct address.


Use a combination of smart groups, tags, CiviRules, and CiviReports.

A. Create a Smart Group

  1. Use Search Builder to search for Contact :: Envelope # :: Not Empty OR Not Null OR > 0
  2. From search results, create new smart group (called "Has Envelope #")

B. Create a tag called "Update External Address"

C. Setup a CiviRule

  1. Create a Rule with the Linked Event as "Address Changed"
  2. Linked Condition is "Contact (not) in group", "In one of selected groups", "Has Envelope #"
  3. Linked Action is "Add tag to contact", "Update external address"

D. Create a Report

  1. Create a report off of Constituent Report.
  2. Filter the report to look for contacts tagged "Update External Address".
  3. Setup report for email delivery (if needed).

E. Office manager runs the report at her discretion (or gets emailed the report) and updates the addresses in the external program.

F. Once the address is updated in the external program, untag the relevant contact.

  • Thanks! I tried to mark as answer. Stack Exchange said I had to wait 2 days. :) Really wrestled with the issue til we came up with the solution so wanted to share. – Allen Hutchison Aug 22 '15 at 4:03
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    Great answer, @AllenHutchison! Does that mean that you are using CiviRules on a live environmnent? We have done so for three months, but are always interested in linking up with other CiviRules users...! – Flying Aug 26 '15 at 4:49
  • Hi Flying, yes, we are using it on our production environment. It is a great solution for us. Between CiviRules and core functions of Civi, we were able to achieve what we needed. Thank you so much for your part in making it happen! – Allen Hutchison Aug 26 '15 at 17:10
  • Allen - what version of civi is this on? trying to find evidence of it working on 4.6 – petednz - fuzion Oct 4 '15 at 20:06
  • Hi Pete, yup, we're on 4.6.7. – Allen Hutchison Oct 5 '15 at 0:25

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