CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

The following is a use-case scenario that describes how groups would like to use Civi to not only track events and activities, but also be able to track and analyze their tactics and strategies they're using to get their members to participate.   I initially had some thoughts also about civiCase, because I believe Dave G. briefly mentioned that it can be use for "loose" (my words) project management, but I'm not totally sure about that route yet.

Let me start with the scenario -

A base-building community organizing group uses a data flow structure for community organizing that included Actions and Tactics rather than Events and Activities.

In this structure, Actions are activities members are invited to participate in, with a specific date range. Actions include meetings/hearings, rallies/direct actions, calls to decision makers, letters to decision makers, emails to decision makers, petition signing, and participation in public committees (such as community planning groups or government stakeholder committees).  

Tactics, on the other hand, are the activities implemented by staff and lead organizers to get the members to do the Actions. Tactics include door knocking, presentations, phone banking, house meetings, e-blasts, community events, and house visits. So the Tactic needs to be linked to the Action and also needs to include the member’s response (whether or not they committed to do the action) and the Result (whether they actually did it, to the extent we could determine it).  The end goals would be a chronological record of all the actions and efforts undertaken for a particular project, and also a way to quantify the effort (realizing that actual calculations would have to be done outside of civicrm).


Can Events and Activities, and maybe civiCase (if it's applicable) include the actions and tactics that groups want to track.  It seems that Activities and Events can track much of the individual responses, and actions, but we would need to be able to connect the activities and events together - maybe through a custom source code field in activity and event where the option values are shared between the two?  We'd also need to be able to export information from activities and events, as well as the area (civicase?) that would track the "tactics".

Does anyone have any thoughts, ideas, potential solutions that we ought to consider?

alice

 

Peter,

At present we can create Custom Fields per individual event - it would be great if there was the option to do it per Event Type

If you look at second selector for "Event", it lists "Event Types" and not events. May be we should change the label from "Events" to "Events (Event Type)". That means you can still create custom fields for specific event type which would work in context of events (and not participants). And in 3.1 http://civicrm.org/node/644 feature allows you to extend custom fields for one or more specific event type.

any chance this is an easy tweak you can squeeze in given that you already have Participant (role) and Participant (event name) - can we also get Participant (Event Type)?

With http://civicrm.org/node/644 our main focus was to "Support multiple types within an object for custom group" and didn't have time to squeeze "Participant (Event Type)" in. We 'll check with team if its possible to add it at this stage (in 3.1).