CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm thinking about how to implement a client request (CiviCRM 3.0) for a public listing/appreciation of major donors, grouped by ranges of total contributions in the past year (e.g. 1,000 - 2,000 total contribution in the past year = "gold", let's call that a contributor category).

Seems like I could automate this in a few ways (i'm ignoring the switches for privacy issues to simplify here):

1. Custom search

But i don't think this is really the intended function of custom searches ...

2. Views 2 - contributions

This gives me a sorted list of large contributions from the past year, but doesn't seem able to group by range, or deal with total contributions per constituent.

3. View 2 - contacts

Unfortunately, the relationship feature of views, allowing me to relate to the contributions, doesn't seem to be there.

So in this case, I'm thking really simple: add a custom select field of the contributor category which is manually maintained, or updated periodically with a script.

Anyone else with this problem out there including a better solution?

few thoughts:

1. Can you use various instances of a contribution report like:

http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/report/instance/3?reset=1&force=1&snippet=4&section=2

and put that in a block? This might just require some HTML formatting.

2. some crm's have got the concept of roll-up fields. So basically you introduce three new custom fields that extend contact:

total donations this year
total donations last year
total donation of all time

You can then use triggers (or a cron job or a hook) to keep those fields in sync and on yearly boundaries recalculates the values. That might be something we should think about adding support for in CiviCRM (even if it is at a developer level).

lobo