CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Here's a use-case example of what I'd like to do...

• We send out a mail appeal to several thousand of our contacts. (We can do this task fine already.)
• We somehow record in CiviCRM which contacts we selected to receive the appeal. (This is the task I don't know how to do.)
• Some of the contacts receiving the appeal make contributions though a designated contribution page or by mailing in a check.
• We ensure that the contribution data unambiguously links the contribution to a specific appeal. (We are currently achieving this goal by relying on a combination of a contribution type and a date range)
• Several months later we can answer questions like: "What was the return rate of that particular appeal", or even "Show me a list of the past 5 appeals with their associated return rates."

So the main quandary here is figuring out how to store the appeal information. Ideally there would be an `appeal` table that would store the name of the appeal, the date of the appeal, and the contribution type associated with the appeal. Then there would be an appeal<=>contact join table so that we could mark which contacts received the appeal.

Being that we don't currently have the data-storage functionality outlined above, I'm trying to find a decent way to do it...

Activities?
...seems close to the functionality that I want. It would be hard to do things like "Show me a list of the past 5 appeals" though

Events?
...solves the problem mentioned with activities, but comes with added complexity of participant role and status... also presents risk that contacts will receive auto-generated registration email... also introduces conceptual inconsistency because most people enjoy thinking of events as a time-line of people's involvement.

Tags?
Simple, but maybe too simple. The name of the tag could be made to include a machine-parseable date and contribution type, but then the tags are becomes very cluttered -- but maybe hierarchy could mitigate the clutter.

Custom data?
A custom multi-select field on contacts... solves the clutter issue of the tags, except that it's difficult to take a large set of contacts and add/remove certain option-values for that field.

How are other people dealing with this need?