CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi all,

I am currently working out how to deal with the "organisation as member" focus of my NFP, particularly how this relates to the Drupal user relationship.  There is quite high staff turnover within our member organisations, and members will often only have one email address that is shared by the staff and volunteers.  For this reason when we set up our members as Drupal users (before installing CiviCRM) we gave each organisation a user account, with their organisation name as their username.  I'm now ready to synchronise these users with contacts, and this is where my problem begins as CiviCRM requires an individual drupal user, not an organisation (which makes sense, as it's people who operate computers and not organisations). 

I've been considering the following options:

1. Set up a fake individual for each organisation as the Drupal user (eg first name: SampleOrg, surname: User).

2. Create one generic username and password that all organisations use to log onto the website and get access to private documents, and change this password every six months or so. 

3. Delegate one person from each organisation (most likely the manager) as the drupal user and set the drupal account up under their name and email.

Currently we are not using the CRM for anything other than contacting our members and tracking their status as financial or not.  Only financial members are given Drupal user accounts, and they only use these to download private documents (no commenting or user interaction).  We would be looking at expanding this in the future, but at the moment we don't have the IT skills or budget to set this up. 

My feeling is option 1 is the most viable at this stage, as we don't have to worry about disabling someone's Drupal user account because they have left the organisation.  And the reality is, the new manager would probably just log in with the old manager's account and change the name, which would confuse things even more.  This option will not be so good if we start using modules like CiviEvent for collecting event registrations, but I don't see this happening until a year or two in the future given our budget and time restraints, at which time we can reassess how we manage the user accounts.

I have read the documentation and forum posts regarding "on behalf of" relationships between employees and employers, and the other "organisation as membership" topics, but I think this is just adding an unnecessary layer of complexity for administration of our memberships, mainly because of the high staff turnover. 

Any feedback or insight on this topic would be most appreciated, even if it's just pointing out the drawbacks of possible options.

Cheers,
Erica.

Good point Peter, thanks!