Let’s introduce ourselves…

[LindseyM]

Thanks everyone for your recent comments and hello to Sarah and robinhood.  It's helpful to see the common themes emerging for us as a sector and hopefully this will generate some collaboration on these issues. 

Issues around relationships in event registrations and the ability to deal with recurring events seem to be hot topics right now so I would encourage you to comment further on Sarah's wiki on the relationships issue at http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Relationship+improvements+for+the+self-service+areas and on my latest forum post on recurring events as a Make It Happen at http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,23399.msg98274.html#msg98274 

Scott - as I mentioned earlier I'm afraid I don't have answers on the household issue, only some additional thoughts to throw into the fray.

- When listing household (HH) members I presume you'd want to list the adults first and then the children. At present the HH relationships set up in Civi are 'member of' and 'head of'. I wonder if we need within households to identify Adult 1, Adult 2, child 1 etc to enable listings to identify the adults first in a directory? A demarcation of this sort would mean that if, at some point, the 'merge by households' export could be expanded to include the name of each HH member, this would immediately provide the simplified directory that you mention in point 1 (HH name, address, individuals, HH phone etc). It would also mean you would be able to identify the adults in a HH for use in external mailmerges etc 

- I guess the issue of excluding some adult children is best done with a custom field if this is just an occasional request. I think I mentioned in a different thread that we remove children from their parents' household once they become adults as we deal with them as a separate entity at that point, but the relationship 'child of' remains as a helpful point of info. This means that if Matt is 18 and is living at home and we're doing a large mailing, we can use 'merge label by household' to ensure Mum & Dad get one letter between them, but Matt gets his own letter as he's an adult (even though he's living at home).  The same would be true of your directory perhaps, that you'd want Matt listed in his own right, separately from Mum & Dad's household so that he's not listed along with his kid brothers and sisters!  (Having said that, 'Merge labels by household' functionality isn't currently working - bug reported at http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-8338 but recently downgraded from a 4.2 to 4.3 fix)

- Do you intend to create your directory from an initial household search (because you identify a HH as a 'member')?  I ask because we deal with individuals as members, not HHs. For example, Dad and the children may be members but Mum may not be (but is listed on Civi and in the HH because she attends the toddler group). We would want to create any membership directory from an initial search of members, then merged by household - an added complication as exports of membership searches don't give the 'merge by' options at the point of export but this is easily worked around with smart groups I guess.

Sorry to only offer further reflections rather than solutions at this stage. Thanks to lobo for kickstarting things with a report suggestion and to Scott and dowd for looking into possible solutions.

Lindsey

[FatherShawn]

Lindsey++ for getting this section going!  My name is Shawn Duncan.  I am a priest in the Episcopal Church and I have been using CiviCRM with parish churches for five years.  I recently began a new position with the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island in which I am the the diocese's first chief information officer.

I will be migrating the diocesan administration from Outlook/Access to Civi over the next several months - a big but exciting project.  Next up will be figuring out how to offer a means to our parishes for the same thing - essentially an internal Drupal/Civi SaaS.  So I'm interested in figuring out how to have appropriate data sharing between parishes and diocese while respecting the reality that our parishes are separate corporations from our diocese...  there have been a variety of discussions and wiki posts on this topic but I'm aware that there are a settled box of tools on this topic - I'll get a thread going in this new sub-board to toss around ideas.

[LindseyM]

Hi Father Shawn
Congratulations on your new role.  It's great to hear from you as I know you've done a lot of Civi thinking and development over the years.  People may be interested in the Civirelate module you developed (http://drupal.org/project/civi_relate and http://drupal.org/node/819840) to create relationships in Civi when asking for info on referees/emergency contacts etc.

I look forward to you starting other discussion topics on this forum - particularly as you get to grips with the needs of the parishes and explore potential functionality that will help them.

Lindsey

[Stuart Parker]

I have been using CiviCRM+Drupal to share contact information for a UK-based Christian charity for the last 2 years. It's really helped us to collaborate as a small team over a number of locations.

We use CiviEvent, CiviMail and CiviMember at present.

Data security is important to us, so if anyone's interested in user validation and/or data encryption I can share my thoughts.

Stuart

[FatherShawn]

Stuart-

Security is important in general and many members are nervous about personal privacy and or identity theft - a thread on good security would be welcome!

[scott.ward@fifthestateci]

Hi All ... so I finally got this to work by modifying the "relationship" report.

It's a bit inelegant, I know, and there's some code that needs to go, but by adding a customized "link" field to the individual contact, populating that with a link to a directory photo, and running it through a Word mail merge, this produces a photo directory by household.

Two things that are driving me crazy:

-- I can't figure out how to keep the household name from repeating on the output (e.g., on the "employer" report, the employer is only listed once).
-- I can't figure out how to add the additional address line to a column.

If anyone's got any ideas I'd love to hear them. In the meantime, hope folks find this report useful!

http://www.fifthestateci.com/joomla/Directory.php

Scott

[hamish_old]

http://svn.civicrm.org/sfschool/trunk/SFS/Report/Form/Roster.php

Hi Lobo,
404 on that link.  Can you please repost?
Cheers,
Hamish

[Donald Lobo]

check

http://svn.civicrm.org/sfschool/trunk/org.civicrm.school/School/Report/Form/

lobo

[LindseyM]

Hi everyone
I've just started a new thread on this forum about particular Civi features which will benefit our sector. It's mainly so that people checking out this section can see some relevant input at a glance without trawling through the introductions section!

In that new section I've mentioned two recent Civi blogs I've written:

Recurring Events - info on a new Make It Happen project of great interest to our sector  http://civicrm.org/blogs/lindseym/recurring-events-%E2%80%93-it%E2%80%99s-time-%E2%80%98make-it-happen%E2%80%99

Groups view - new functionality for viewing Civi groups in a hierarchy http://civicrm.org/blogs/lindseym/new-features-extension-civi-groups

Both of these blogs and the features they highlight are highly relevant to Civi users in a faith community setting so please check out the new topic I've started to find out more... and please consider helping to fund the Make It Happen project as I know this will benefit our sector (and others!) greatly. Thanks very much.

Lindsey

 

[dreadedhamish]

I'm a minister with the Anglican church in Australia.  I've observed civiCRM from afar for a long time and I'm only just implementing it for the first time - for a Christian camps organisation.  I nearly gave up on this project for a while because of the complexities of having paid events where the purchaser (parent) isn't the attender (child). 
When I found Lisa Hubberts presentation (http://irc.civicrm.org/SFArtsED_Summer_Civi_Preso.pdf) that gave me hope.  Since then I've had a hard time trying to use that solution and figure out what versions of drupal and civiCRM work with it.  I tried another commerce solution and that got pretty close.  I'm encouraged by the new functionality of Webform_civiCRm intregration that will work with civiCRM 4.4 - that should have the job a lot easier.

[ChrisChinchilla]

Hey hamish… Where in Australia are you?

We do have a very quiet ANZ forum, but it most usefully contains links to our local meetup groups!

http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,27570.0.html

[dreadedhamish]

Melbourne town...

[LindseyM]

Hi Hamish. Good to hear from you. You may be interested to know that we're currently working on a tweaked version of Civi specifically for churches/mosques/synagogues etc which will have additionality functionality of interest to those groupings. In the coming weeks/months I'll post more about it so that others can benefit too.

[dreadedhamish]

Great.  I joined the Melbourne group.

[ChrisChinchilla]

Great! And Lindsey, I'm trying to formalise and get together a list of CiviCRM installations specific to particular regions and industries, see here - http://civicrm.org/blogs/chrischinchilla/civicrm-distributions-starter-kits

Maybe PM me.
Chris