Advise required: New functionality for managing physical goods donations

[matty]

Hello,

I have recently started helping out a non-for-profit organisation that provides material aid to asylum seekers. We rely on donations of mostly 2nd hand goods from the community that we then provide to the recipients. 

We are currently using spreadsheets to manage everything and needless to say it is becoming more and more difficult each day to keep track of everything. 

I am an IT solution architect and am investigating setting up CiviCRM as the main solution for the organisation.  There are many features that I believe we will be able to use OOTB or with minimal configuration / customisation.  There are however a few requirements that are specific to the way the organisation works and I believe may require custom development. 

As someone that is new to CiviCRM I was hoping to get some advice on the best approach to implement these requirements.  If possible I would like to minimise the amount of code and if these requirements can be met through configuration of existing extensions or core then all the better!   

Specifically we need to track and coordinate the distribution of physical goods donations. This includes the following high level user stories:

- As a Volunteer I want to record that a person or household has requested specific goods as needed
- As a member of the public (donor) I would like to offer goods to WWW for donation
- As a Goods Coordinator I want to view a list of current goods donations and match them to the current goods demand to determine if I should accept the donation.
- As a Goods Coordinator I want to view a list of current accepted goods donations and match them to the most appropriate household / person
- As a Goods Coordinator I want to be able to mark goods as located in one of our storage locations for allocation in future

As you can see the tracking of physical goods is critical to delivering most of this functionality.  I have reviewed the existing extensions and was unable to identify any that comes close to our requirements.

I am beginning my deep dive into the developer documentation however I am taking the first step recommended and that is to post here to get advice about whether custom code is required.

Thanks for taking the time to read my lengthy post and I hope to hear from you soon.

Regards,

Matty.

[ayduns]

Matty,
A bit depends on the size of your operation, but you may be able to get quite a long way towards your goals with Activities.  You're probably already aware that you can add your own activity types, activity statuses and create custom fields in activities.

Create activity statuses that match your process e.g.:"Requested", "Offered", "Accepted", "Matched", "Received", "Declined" and the default statuses "Completed", "Cancelled"

Create an activity of "Goods requested". Possibly add custom fields e.g. for the type of goods (furniture, white goods etc) to help with the matching.

Create an activity of "Goods offered".  Add the same custom fields for matching

- As a Volunteer I want to record that a person or household has requested specific goods as needed

Volunteer records a "Goods requested" activity with status "Requested" attached to the requestor contact record

- As a member of the public (donor) I would like to offer goods to WWW for donation

Use a webform to collect donor details and donation offered. Create "Goods offered" activity with status "Offered"

- As a Goods Coordinator I want to view a list of current goods donations and match them to the current goods demand to determine if I should accept the donation.

Use a view to see offered "Goods Requested" activities and requested "Goods offered", along with filters based on your custom data
(I'm assuming the matching process is "assisted manual" rather than "automatic").  To accept the donation set "Goods offered" to "Accepted" and notify donor.

When the goods are received from the donor, set it to "Received"

- As a Goods Coordinator I want to view a list of current accepted goods donations and match them to the most appropriate household / person

A similar view but with accepted (or received) Goods Offered and requested Goods Requested.  To record the match, add the requestor to the Goods Offered activity and the donor to the Goods Requested activity. Set both activities statuses to "Matched"

- As a Goods Coordinator I want to be able to mark goods as located in one of our storage locations for allocation in future

Maybe create the storage location as an organisation and add to the Goods Offered activity.


Obviously there are many details to work through to match your workflow.

I'm very interested to hear other approaches!

[Hershel]

If you use Drupal I think you could manage the Goods as Drupal nodes and associate them with Contacts. You might use https://www.drupal.org/project/civicrm_entity for that.

If the Goods were in Drupal you will be able to more easily manage all the details and lists (Views) you need I think.

[matty]

ayduns:

Thank you so much for your detailed response.  I just started looking at this option today.  Specifically I was considering using CiviCase to track through similar workflows as you have outlined.   Do you think CiviCase is required or should I just create the activities ?

I like the idea of creating the storage locations as Organisations or possibly just using any contact type since goods can be stored at some of our volunteers houses, etc.


Hershel:

This was the other option that I was considering, however my knowledge of Drupal is quite lacking, although I have done a bit of PHP development before.

I think it might be time to do a proof of concept of one of my use cases in each option and see which option is best!

[JohnFF]

Everything that Hershel said.

Definitely use CiviCase.

My suggestion would be to configure the activities and CiviCase and then just go!

You should also consider using households for whitegoods etc.

I also think that CiviVolunteer would be a red herring here.

(It sounds like this organisation does incredible work by the way. Let me know if I can help.)