CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi everyone,

I'm the "resident techie" for my small town tennis club....we have about 80 members, with a few membership types (Junior, Adult, Family, etc).  Until now, we've kept track of our membership each year in an exceedingly simple Excel spreadsheet.  In that spreadsheet, we record basic information, how much they paid, which membership they had, emergency contact info, and that's about it.  Very simple stuff.

However, I figured that since we have a Joomla website, I figured I'd take advantage of that and try to find a way we could keep this information online rather than in an Excel file.  That's what brought me to CiviCRM....I couldn't really find any other software to do it.

Now, I've got CiviCRM installed, I've messed around in the back end of things, and I'm completely, utterly lost as to how to proceed  I have to confess that I'm a little confused and daunted by CiviCRM as a whole...I'm not even sure who this is designed to be used by!

All I want to do is set up the following:

1.  A data entry form on a webpage (likely a menu choice from our club's website), where authorized people from our club can enter new members when they submit a membership application form.  The form would just have basic info, gender, membership type, phone number, and so on.  It would keep track of our members for the current year.

2.  A way for the same authorized club people to search for members by things like name, phone number, or address, and then edit and save the member's information.  For instance, let's say they add a new member in the "new member" data entry form, and then a week later need to go find that person and indicate that they paid their membership fees with a cheque.  Or, at the beginning of next year, they need to remove a member who's not going to be renewing their membership.  Ideally, this form would also let us search past members...this would be very helpful if, say, a past member suddenly decided to renew with us....instead of re-inputting all his information, we could just "re-activate" him somehow.  That'd be neat.

3.  Simple reports, like how much money we made in membership fees; how many people there are for each of the five membership types we have; that sort of thing.  The reports are actually very low on the priority list...if I can get some reports set up, great, but if not, it's no big thing.  The big thing is tracking who's a member at our club, and keeping track of who's paid up.

4.  A way to email members who are "in the database" with news, upcoming events, and so on.

All of the above would need to be done via a FRONT-END page, not a back-end (the fact that I barely know what I'm doing here, and yet I'm the techie, should tell you how important it is to keep these folks away from the back-end admin area....)

That's all I need to do.  But I'm overwhelmed by the size and scale of CiviCRM, and not sure exactly where to start.  I've read through teh help, but all that served to do is confuse me even more  

Can someone just give me a shove in the right direction as to how to tackle this?  I'm sure it's fairly simple...CiviCRM seems designed to handle much, much larger organizations than our humble tennis club

Thank you!

Oh...is that the actual instruction manual?  I thought the wiki, which I looked through fairly extensively, was the manual.....well, that might explain a few things Lol!!

Thanks, I will go look

No

for that sort of seperation,  our drupal integration is better since it has permissioning support and no seperation between front end and back end

lobo

You can copy profiles, or quite easily reproduce them by selecting the same fields. I'd suggest that for your users-editing-themselves profile you make a new profile and use that - even if it is largely a copy of another one. Its more flexible going forward, too.

Some of the core profiles can't be easily fiddled with. Also, where you have a profile that users can edit, note that the logging in CiviCRM isn't extensive (unless anyone can show me a history function I've missed). If a user changes their name you can't track back to find out what they did. You may not want people to have total freedom to edit their profile (e.g. we use two profiles for our site - one where they can see their data, and one where they can edit it, but I don't let them edit their name, as I want to keep track of our members and not have them move memberships around by changing their name).

hey canadave - if you want to IM me we can probably have a quick skype chat/demo and i can probably get you over your learning bump quite quickly

All good - you may want to update your profile to show Drupal ;-)