CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm trying to maintain a supporter database for our NDP riding association. Part of our need is to track volunteers and their activities (who has signed up for canvassing); and part of it is to track things like who has taken signs.

Many of these items will be tracked over several elections as the database is used, so we'll have people who act as canvassers in 2007 but don't want to be canvassers in 2009, or who don't want a sign this year but do in the next campaign.

One option seems to be to have custom data "2007 volunteer" with fields for different activity types. But then we'd have "2009 volunteer" etc as time goes on, which seems unwieldy.

If we consider an election campaign as an "event type" then we can use participant roles or participant status fields to hold volunteer activities and so on. But then those roles appear as options for all event types too. I'm leaning towards this model, but I'm not entirely sure yet.

Opinions?

lobo:

I take the hint about helping with implementation. Unfortunately I'm a drupal/CiviCRM newbie with an election day in five weeks time, so in the short term it is not likely. But I just received a copy of "Pro Drupal Development" in the mail so maybe after October 10 I'll see what I can contribute.

For others stumbling across this topic. Looks like the event approach won't be practiccal as (from what I can see) I would have to register a volunteer with the "campaign 2007" event multiple times to get each role (display a sign, canvass, etc), which would be very clumsy.

So I think I'll be adding a "Volunteer 2007" custom data group with fields for canvassing, office work etc, and deal with later campaigns when they happen. Any other ideas still welcome!

Tom