CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

You might want to consider using the multi site stuff in 3.0

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Multi+Site+Installation

seems to be a good match for your use case

lobo

its still one install of civicrm, multiple sites in drupal (so national/regional/chapter have their own sub-site).

uses drupal's multi-site feature. a few orgs with characteristics like your org are trying it out and putting resources into making it work. so might be a good model to follow

lobo

What about. Dave's comment (http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,2539.0/prev_next,prev.html#new )
That said, depending on how "automated" you need this to be, and how large the "sets" of local chapters and states are... you could potentially handle this with custom fields "Used for" membership - combined with the Smart Group functionality.

You could create a membership type for each local chapter, and use a State/Province type custom field to "mark" the state umbrella it belongs to. You could actually derive that from the address of the Chapter Organization that "owns" each membership - but I think if you want to do a search / have smart groups which contain members of each "umbrella state" - it will be easier to use a custom field.

Alternatively you could create a membership type for each State organization, and then use custom fields to assign the chapters. There could be a lot of setup here - but the advantage of this approach is that each state's membership type can have it's own option list for the "Local Chapter" custom field (since you can say that a given custom field is used for a specific membership type).

Allocating a portion of local dues to the state organization would need to be a manual accounting function. You can assign different "Contribution Types" with corresponding accounting codes to each membership type - so this may help w/ the accounting.

I've done a bit of reading and experimenting and here is the current plan.  If anyone sees flaws in the plan - please tell us why we should do it differently.  

• One Organisation, everything belongs to this Org
• Groups: Regional Office - All are regular groups so we can use Access Control
• State Groups
• Chapters Groups

Users - groups for special permissions

• National Staff
• Regional Staff
• Advisors

Overview: 1 National Office, several regional offices, (each regional office covers one or more complete states), 70+ chapters. More regionals offices are planned.  To keep our flexibility we are using groups. Creating a group for each state will allow us to easily move all of the chapters in one state to a new regional office.


Step 1: Create Customized Data
To create the customized membership form we created Custom Data (Admin->Customize->Custom Data) for the general membership questions (Junior members included guardian info, Sr membership included a second address), and a data set for chapters available to join for that state.  To recap - since this doesn't seem very clear.  We have two member forms, one child, one adult, and 50 chapter lists by state.

Step 2: Created Custom Profile (Admin->Customize->CiviCRM Profile)  The Customized Data from step one creates different fields, the custom profile allows us to choose which of the fields we want to incorporate.  And if we want to re-label fields etc.  

Relationship Types (Admin->Option Lists->Relationship Types)  Now this took a bit of figuring out, and I'm going to play with it some more.  When I get it figured out, I will post my notes

Membership Type (Admin->Option Lists->Membership Types)  Now this took a bit of figuring out, and I'm going to play with it some more.  When I get it figured out, I will post my notes

Step 3:  Create Membership Forms
We opted to create two membership pages for each state, one child, one adult.  CiviContribute (where we create the membership page) allows us to include two (2) customized profiles.  We chose to have the second profile the chapter list for state.

So now I have a membership form that I like.  The next challenges are to make sure I have the permissions/roles set to allow staff the correct access.  I'd like to be able to format the page better than it is formatted now.  I can grab a code snippet from the CiviCRM Profile area, but NOT the CiviContribute page.

Thank you for the feedback, I will check it out.  My largest concern was being able to move a group of states from one area to another.  Somewhere I read where you can't change a group from one org to another, so that's why I settled on groups. 

But before I do more, I will explore...