Data Models: How should I set up CiviCRM for my event reporting?

[elijah]

Hi CiviCRM friends,

I'm the Community Manager for the NetSquared nonprofit tech meetups and I'd like to start using CiviCRM to help with managing and tracking my volunteer group leaders and their events. What's the best data structure that allows me to report on the # of events held by each group and the # of attendees?

CiviCRM seems pretty friendly so far. The one big question I have is around the data model for recording my events. What's the best way to do this in CiviCRM given my reporting needs.

Data Model Options

ACTIVITY
I've done my initial mock up with the Activities and added the custom field "# of attendees" on the Activity, but can't figure out how to run a report that totals the number of attendees.

MULTIPLE RECORD FIELDSETS
This is how I would have tackled the problem in Salesforce, but looks can this data can't be exported currently.

EVENT MODULE
Seems like the obvious fit, but I was steered away because I was told it would bring in too much complexity. I'm not recording the participants, since this is happening in meetup. I just want to record the number of participants for reporting purposes.

• What are the minimum fields for importing an event and can I do it in one step?
• Can I create an event without Participants?

How I'm capturing data

I plan to manage my Net2 groups [Organizations] and volunteers [Individuals] directly in CiviCRM. Event data is coming from Meetup.com and is currently manually entered into a spreadsheet which is imported once a month.

Reporting
The primary goal of this project is to give me better reporting tools. Currently everything is going into a spreadsheet, which sucks.

Common Reports

• Total number of attendees at all events in the month/quarter/fiscal year
• Total number of groups who held at least one event in the previous month/quarter/fiscal year
• Total number of events in the month/quarter/fiscal year
• List of Net2 groups sorted by activity status and grouped by Country (have/have not held event)

I've mocked up a preliminary data model diagram here: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/e0787b42-6951-4759-9de7-b414774f3e31/cbe13fcdc05217c3a177d0169fd457cf

[xavier]

So you need to add a #number of participants somewhere, that isn't a default one and therefore a custom field.
If you don't intend to register the participants, it's probably easier to create a new type of activity "meetup" with each of your Net2group and that custom field.

As for the reporting, check civisualize, there are examples on contributions and events, but wouldn't be complicated to add a custom one for your need (reporting on activities+adding that #participants custom field)