Author Topic: Advice needed on possible setup (Read 2166 times)

Maurice Snellen · July 01, 2010, 12:27:07 pm

Hello!

I am responsible technically for the website of a local community center. I am looking at CiviCRM to see if it suitable for us. I've read through most of the documentation (save the develoment part) and am wondering how I would best set things up for us.
Legally, the community center is a dutch foundation, which means it doesn't technically have any real 'members'.

There are a couple of types of contacts that I would like to put into our CRM.

Donors (people who give a yearly amount of money to us);
General volunteers, people who help out at several activities all year around
Youth work volunteers, who help out with youth activities during the summer only
Boardmembers
Children who attend the youth activities

I would like to organize the children into households and eventually we might want to have the parents sign up the children for the activities, so they should be able to act on behalf of their children. The children however will not always have e-mail addresses of their own (most 4-year olds don't).
Is this possible?

There may be overlap between all groups except the children, although they might eventually become youth work volunteers once they turn 14.

We organize workshops for youth volunteers in preparation for the events and need to set up events and track attendance. Some of the workshops result in volunteers being allowed to act as traffic assistant for a period of a year and I need to track which volunteers are allowed to do this.

I'm looking for the best use of groups, tags and memberships within CiviCRM to deal with these situations.

Can you make a suggestion?

Maurice

Dave Greenberg · July 01, 2010, 03:47:23 pm

You'll probably need to experiment w/ some workflows and tweak a bit. However, based on the info so far I think you can simply create regular Groups for
- General Volunteers
- Youth Work Volunteers

For "Boardmembers" - you could also use a group OR you could create a new relationship type and track this with relationships between the board member contacts and an organization contact record you create for the community center itself. Relationships allow you to track tenure (start and end dates). You could then create a smart group (from advanced search) for 'active' board member relationships.

For "Children who attend youth activities" - this could also be a regular group, or a smart group from advanced search based on Event Type + Participant Status. Similar approach for Donors.

You'll probably want to create Parent / Child relationships with relationship permissioning set from Parent to Child. You may or may not need to set up Households.

I don't think you need CiviMember / Memberships.

xavier · July 02, 2010, 01:28:13 am

Hi,

Part of the answer depends also on what you will do with these "categories".
If you want to mail them on a regular basis, you will probably need a group. On the good news, with smart groups, you can easily create a group based on something else.

Having overlap between groups per se isn't an issue (one contact can belong to as many groups as possible). However, mixing between tags & groups allows you to find in one click for instance all the contacts in the group "children" that are tagged "youth worker volunteer" (no idea if this example make any sense).

Where you at the benelux meetup next week ? If you have a budget for the project, might be good that you start building a prototype and spend a few hours with one of the consultants in nl so you can check up with him/her the various questions you have.

At the end of the day, feel free to test, that's usually quite simple to replace a group by a tag or vice versa if you realise it wasn't the best way to categorise your contacts.

X+

P.S. I'd suggest you to have a look at civicase, might be handy to help you prepare your activities (think of it as a mini project management tool)

Maurice Snellen · July 02, 2010, 07:02:43 am

Thank you for your wonderful answers, this is really making me more and more confident that CiviCRM is something I may want to use.

I was't at the Benelux meet-up. Mostly because until two weeks ago, I didn't know CiviCRM existed.
I'm in the process of migrating our website from Joomla 1.0.x to 1.5.x and because we are preparing for the new play week for the children (end of august) with pre-sales planned for the second full week of July, I had been looking around for a tool within Joomla that could help us do this.
The original trigger was that we currently use a Filemaker database without online access. A couple of the other members of the organizing committee complained to me that they didn't like not being able to see current information and/or update information themselves without going through me. Therefore I was thinking about integrating everything with our existing website.
We are an all volunteer organization with very limited funds (the site is running on my Linux server at home...)
Looking at the answers, I may consider using relationships for volunteers as well so I can track from when to when they have been volunteering for us.

Without having tried this, there was one other thing I was wondering. Children that parents sign up for our play week can participate in a special programme for children ages 10 through 12. Is there some way to configure the form so that this option is available only if the child, based on birth date, has the correct age?

Also, is there a standard field to put a photo in? We will want to create photo-badges for our volunteers.

Kind regards,
Maurice

Donald Lobo · July 02, 2010, 10:27:55 am

Quote from: msnellen on July 02, 2010, 07:02:43 am

Without having tried this, there was one other thing I was wondering. Children that parents sign up for our play week can participate in a special programme for children ages 10 through 12. Is there some way to configure the form so that this option is available only if the child, based on birth date, has the correct age?

Also, is there a standard field to put a photo in? We will want to create photo-badges for our volunteers.

You can potentially do that via the buildForm hook and remove the element (or add it) if the child does not meet the criteria. You will need pretty decent PHP skills to do so

You can upload the photo as a custom field or use the image URL which is a bit more exposed in v3.2

lobo

Erik Hommel · July 03, 2010, 01:41:04 am

Hello Maurice,
interesting plans! As we are Dutch: would you like to meet for an introduction session where we can have a look at some of the possibilities and hopefully answer some of your questions? Send me a mail at hommel@ee-atwork.nl?
Erik

den Bart · August 11, 2010, 01:08:27 pm

I'm looking for the same thing (for a music school)
We might want to have the parents sign up the children for the activities, so they should be able to act on behalf of their children. The children however will not always have e-mail addresses of their own.
Have you found a way to configurate this ?

Thanks!
Bart

Donald Lobo · August 11, 2010, 02:36:27 pm

might want to check CiviSchool:

http://civicrm.org/CiviSchool
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC32/CiviSchool

Note that this is still at a very developer centric stage (IMO) and you will need good php skills to install and use it. You might also want to consider hiring someone from http://civicrm.org/professional/ if u do not have those skills

lobo

Erik Hommel · August 11, 2010, 11:38:27 pm

Hi Bart,
I am one of the people Lobo spoke about in his previous post, and based in The Netherlands. Quite happy to discuss your requirements and what the possibilities / challenges could be, let me know on hommel@ee-atwork.nl?
Erik

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Author Topic: Advice needed on possible setup (Read 2166 times)

Maurice Snellen

Advice needed on possible setup

Dave Greenberg

Re: Advice needed on possible setup

xavier

Re: Advice needed on possible setup

Maurice Snellen

Re: Advice needed on possible setup

Donald Lobo

Re: Advice needed on possible setup

Erik Hommel

Re: Advice needed on possible setup

den Bart

Re: Advice needed on possible setup

Donald Lobo

Re: Advice needed on possible setup

Erik Hommel

Re: Advice needed on possible setup