CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am looking to implement CiviCRM for a large national non-profit which is organized into state affiliates in each state. Almost all of the organization activities (including paying dues, events, etc) happen at the state level, so we have determined that it would make the most sense to install CiviCRM individually for each state organization to give them complete control over their own state organization.

The complication that I am running into, is that the national organization wants to be able to view the data from all of the state organizations together with their own discrete installation used to track members who wish to have only national membership (primarily corporate and lifetime members).

Does anyone know of any built in functionality that will accomplish this, or has anyone else attempted this/ can think of a way that this could be accomplished?

One possible idea that I had was to use one single installation and add a field to all of the tables for the state code of the state that created the record. The front-end could then be modified to allow the installation on the Oregon site to display only those fields with that have an OR state code, yet the national site can view any record (this has the added benefit of allowing the national organization to see what an entry is created in). This just seems like a lot of work, and I was hoping that there was already some sort of "multi-site" solution floating around out there.

Wow... that was exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for the heads-up