CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

We are a non-profit organisation wishing to use a system to administer some exciting new fundraising events we are running for a UK Registered Charity. We are a volunteer only organisation and I am struggling to decide whether Drupal/Groups or Drupal/CiviCRM would be the best solution.

The site will have a community of Registered Users using forums, creating content etc.

We will organise fundraising Events. A Registered User (Captain) will pay an entry fee which will allow them to create a Team to participate in Events. Other Registered Users, or simply named individuals (who are not Registered Users)  may be added to the Team by the Captain. Events will be restricted in numbers. We will need to keep historical lists of Teams and their Users.

The team shall have a Team web page, with features linked to the team - a blog etc. This team page should be edited by the Team only.

Admins should be able to email all the Teams (all Members of any Team) or just the members of one Team.

The Team will need to submit additional information about their Team before the Event takes place(e.g. Name, logo, mission, etc) but not necessarily at the time of registration for the Event. Some of this should be public and shown on their Team page, some private only for admins.

We will need to display a list of Teams in an Event.

So we essentially have the following groups:
Event(s) -> (consisting of) -> Teams -> (consisting of) -> Registered Users

I'm thinking that the Teams could use the Household concept?

Does all this sound possible? Any tips would be very much appreciated and if anybody is interested in helping us to develop the site, we would love to hear from you and fame (but no fortune!) awaits you!

Thanks, Stephen

What you describe can get complex pretty fast. It is certainly possible with the tools lobo suggests, but make sure you have good software developers. Here are some additional thoughts based on what you've written (and I think I understand).

Rather than event->team->user in the way you describe, the poor man's version using out-of-the box functionality would be:

(1) Use drupal organic groups. Set it up so event=team-> user. You would basically "organic groups enable" an event node. Users self select into events. The "captain" pays, you create the event for them. The captain then approves everyone that applies to participate in the event. (is payment handled via CiviCRM or outside the system?) This is a bunch of permissions configuration, but easy enough to do.

(2) Manually create a CiviContribute donation page for each event (if you are trying to generate online donations).

(3) Try to use ogcivicrm to keep track of event affiliations in CiviCRM (not sure how much can be done via interface - please report back). If that doesn't work all the way, have a developer write code to get the event affiliations into CiviCRM.

Overall, I think it will do what you want it to do.

The choice isn't really drupal/groups OR drupal/civicrm. Really you start with drupal/groups, then get the data into CiviCRM so you can do something useful with it.

Hey Stephen, out of curiosity, how did this work out for you? Did you use the approach suggested by David with Organic Groups, or did you solve it another way?

I'm looking at doing event/team registration as well, so comments would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

Maarten.