CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm rather new to CRM and I am planning to use CiviCRM for our first implementation. I'd like to know what is the best way to model a CRM solution? UML and its diagrams or is there any other notation or software to do this?

Thanks and my apologies if this turns out to be a silly question.
Joeri

Thanks for the swift reply. I'm working in for one of the projects at my university. For this project, there are a lot of  different 'actors' involved:
- permanent staff members (about 20)
- temporary project members (about 80 each year)
- sponsors (about 50)
- people attending our yearly lectures (about 2000)
- individuals or families who donate money (about 800)
- subscribers to our electronic newsletter (about 2500)
- people who (want to) buy from our e-shop (none yet, since we are just starting the e-commerce)
- etc.

In the past (20 years ;-) we kept many lists in Access, Excel etc. to maintain this information. Now, it is time to migrate to a CRM and import all this info in one single database. Our website is already in Drupal (version 5, but we are planning to migrate to version 6 in the near future). Thus, CiviCRM on top of Drupal seemed to be the logical choice.

My fear is that if I do not model our application well ahead of its implementation in CiviCRM, I may be stuck awfterwards. Since I am rather new to CRM, I was just wondering if there is any best practice for setting up such a datamodel.

Thanks,
Joeri

Hi,

I'd suggest you to read the book chapters on that topic, the ERD isn't enough to help you choosing between custom fields, tags, groups, contact subtypes... to model your need.

http://en.flossmanuals.net/CiviCRM/Needs

What works well for us is to define some scenario of what you want to do, eg. anonymous visitor registering to the newsletter, admin sending an email alert to the sponsors...

Then, install civicrm and start customising it and put some test contacts, see if it works. No matter what, you will probably make some mistakes, and realised that you should have taken a different route. In my experience, that's not difficult to change the model afterward, but might be time consuming.

This being said, asking yourself how to model your application is a very good first step not to make any really big mistake.

Good luck.

X+

P.S. If you have the budget, might be worthwhile hiring a consultant a few hours to brainstorm and see if you didn't miss anything obvious

Thanks to both Erik and X+ for their reply's. I think I will read the chapter in the CiviCRM book and see how to proceed from there. I have been thinking about this myself, using a textual requirements document first, followed by an UML use case document and other UML diagrams...

Since I am familiar with ORM (Object Role Modeling), I've also thought of using that to describe the many objects, their attributes and relationships, but I don't think ORM lends itself to describe a CRM model. Any comments on that?

Thanks,
Joeri