Author Topic: Interest inventory with CiviCRM? (Read 1930 times)

chancehunter · November 13, 2007, 12:26:47 pm

Newb here. I'm looking into installing CiviCRM for my church, and one of the things we'd like to be able to do is an interest inventory. (I'm interesting in helping in this way or that way...) I'm hoping you can tell me if CiviCRM will do all this for us. (And I hope I'm posting in the right forum.)

We need to be able to track this, so I don't think a poll will work. In other words, we need to be able to see who is interested in Interest A, email them all, and keep them in touch with each other.

But we also have many existing groups (classes, social groups, volunteer groups) that would need to be "groups" in their own right.

So the process would look something like this. 1. The person would register and say their interested in Interests A, D, and J. Then the leader of Interest J would get in touch with them and invite all other Interest J's to a kickoff conversation. Then different teams would form as folks from Interest J decided to do this new project or that new social activity (so these would be new "groups.")

Can CiviCRM do this. If so, how? As I'm poking through my test install, it looks like the Interest choices would all have to be "groups" too. It seems like this would be very confusing for users, lumping the Interest choices and activity choices all in there together.

Also, is there a way to establish a hierarchy for groups? Like Children's Ministry, which would contain groups for all the different classes, and then Music Ministry, which would contain groups for all the different music programs.

Thanks for reading this long-winded post!

geilhufe · November 13, 2007, 04:09:37 pm

One way to do an interest inventory would be to create a set of custom fields as checkboxes.
() Animals
() Environment
(x) Welfare

Then you can search for all the people with welfare checked. Or you could has a "smart group" composed of all people that currently have welfare checked.
Using profiles, you can allow people to update their own interests.

Your existing groups can be "regular" group composed of members that you select.

So yes, CiviCRM will do this.

Hierarchy is possible, but can require a bit of effort to set up. In your example, you can have a custom field for "Music Ministry"... that field drives a smart group "Music Ministry". Children's Ministry would not be a custom field, but would be a smart group of all contacts with the custom fields checked: the Music Ministry + Class1 + etc.

Best to think this through since it can be a little challenging to maintain.

Denver Dave · November 14, 2007, 07:38:41 am

Hi ChanceHunter - you may also be interested in the group that I'm trying to get together to do occaissional telephone discussions and a study group:
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,1490.0.html

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Author Topic: Interest inventory with CiviCRM? (Read 1930 times)

chancehunter

Interest inventory with CiviCRM?

geilhufe

Re: Interest inventory with CiviCRM?

Denver Dave

Re: Interest inventory with CiviCRM?