CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am a developer working for a non profit music organization.  We have a paying membership of ~1000 people and web site community of about ~2500 people.  We have a yearly 1 week long convention that includes several international level music competitions, as well as seminars and concerts. On our web site we offer special features for paid members.

We need a better way to manage our membership database, membership join and renewal process, and our convention registration/payment process.  I am wondering if civiCRM would be a good solution for some of our tasks.

We currently use Drupal but may be switching to Joomla. I've outlined some of our problems below.  Any thoughts on whether civiCRM is a good solution?

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Convention registration process
We currently use Drupal web forms to enable different types of convention registration.  Each form directs the user to a PayPal form to pay for the registration.  Many registration forms share the same fields, but each form has unique fields.  We need a way to reuse fields on each form or have a master form that adapts to display fields for a specific type of registration.  Site users should only need to register under one of the forms depending upon how they intend to participate in the convention.

   Registration forms:
   Normal registration
      Student, non student with options to go for entire week, 3 day pass or 1 day pass.
   International Artist competition registration
   Youth competition registration
   Youth festival registration
   Vendor fair registration (for vendors)
   Presenter congress registration (seminars specifically for venue promotors)

All those registering for the convention must become members of our organization.  We will need to verify that someone is a member before allowing convention registration.  Ideally we would like to make it easy for someone, who is not yet a member, to both become a member and register for the convention in one process.

We need an option for registration forms to automatically “unpublish” after registration/submission deadline date passes to prevent users submitting forms after the registration date has passed.

Automatically update registration fees after late date registration.

Convention registration and competiton registration should be stored in an online database and CSV for our staff to review.

Membership join and renewal process

Automatically assign a membership drupal role for site members who are registering/paying online, so they can access special features of the web site.

Process for staff to assign membership role to site members who pay offline.

Process for staff to create web site account for members who pay offline and have not yet created a site member account.

Automatically downgrade a user role from membership to registered user role if user does not renew before end of membership (Membership lasts 1 year).

Generate automatic emails to notify members of renewal dates.

A Gift membership form so that others can purchase a membership for friends, family or associates.

Membership database should be accessible online or as download CSV.

Thanks for taking the time to review.  We may just stay with Drupal.

ok, thanks for the help.

Eric - i may be missing some nuances but

1/ Events can be set to have an 'end date' where by they are no longer available so no forms/bookings can be made

2/ Early registration discounts sounds like what is being asked for and is available.

3/ Yes the CMS role can be linked to Membership status so an expired member loses privileges/access to member-only content and functions

4/ Probably the trickiest one since you are doing an 'on behalf of' which currently only works for purchasing for an Organisation but may not require much bending.

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Automatically downgrade a user role from membership to registered user role if user does not renew before end of membership (Membership lasts 1 year).
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I am not sure I understand how civiCRM can automatically change a role in the CMS database for a given user. 

Would this require a periodic cron job to execute a script that checks membership expiration and updates the CMS database accordingly? 

Or would it be something where I set up a script that executes whenever the user logs in, checks the user's membership expiration date and then change roles if the user's membership has expired?

ok thanks for the explanation about the role change.

can you explain a little about how civiCRM can help us manage our registration forms, ie somehow creating groups of form elements or form logic that can be reused on several different registration screens?