Author Topic: Need advice on setting up a state-wide site (Read 1510 times)

hallman · December 16, 2007, 06:03:52 am

I'm setting up my first real CiviCRM site, for a state-wide literacy association that currently has 30 agencies. Their immediate need is for a place to put resources, like policies, and for forums -- basic Drupal.

Long-term I think each of the 30 agencies will want to use the full power of CiviCRM to manage donations, volunteers, events, etc. Can this be done using one site or would each agency need their own site?

I started to set up the registration form to collect Name, Address, and Agency (from a dropdown list), with tags Staff, Executive Director, Board, Volunteer but started thinking long term. Should I set up the agencies as organizations and then the individuals as members of the organizations or should I set up relationships? I'd like to set things up so the site can grow, without having to start over.

Judy Hallman

Donald Lobo · December 16, 2007, 07:34:10 am

a few issues and missing features:

1. civicrm does not deal with multi-org very nicely in its current version. I suspect this will come in a 3.x version with some community support

2. Relationships are not exposed in profiles (for the most part). However groups are exposed, and this could be an alternative (but a 30 checkbox group is not very UI friendly)

3. Relationships are not involved in permissioning. As in 2 above permissions are group based, and hence you should be able to do more stuff using groups.

All the above are fairly important and we will build support or it either directly or indirectly over the next few releases. However without the above, kinda hard to build/structure a assoc with 30 agencies for the long term

You might also want to investigate how to use OG in this situation and if you can potentially use OG and CiviCRM permissioning simultaneously. The democrats abroad project has done that fairly successfully. However the folks at dev seed did write some custom OG code for this. You might want to check with them on the "open source" of the code they wrote. The civicrm <-> OG sync module is open source and part of 1.9. Note that some users have had issues with deploying this

lobo

Michał Mach · December 16, 2007, 07:38:32 am

Hey Judy,

Quote from: hallman on December 16, 2007, 06:03:52 am

Long-term I think each of the 30 agencies will want to use the full power of CiviCRM to manage donations, volunteers, events, etc. Can this be done using one site or would each agency need their own site?

Will each agency have their own collection of donations, volunteers, events and so on? If the answer is YES, than I would recommend either assuming that each agency has separate CiviCRM site, or looking at this: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/ACL's,+Organic+Groups+and+Multi-Org - although second option will be much more complicated to introduce.

In general, I would start lightly, from my experience, initially defined requirements always evolve over time and it's really hard to anticipate proper database structure at the very beginning.

Quote from: hallman on December 16, 2007, 06:03:52 am

I started to set up the registration form to collect Name, Address, and Agency (from a dropdown list), with tags Staff, Executive Director, Board, Volunteer but started thinking long term. Should I set up the agencies as organizations and then the individuals as members of the organizations or should I set up relationships? I'd like to set things up so the site can grow, without having to start over.

Again, I would recommend starting with simple option. Having dropdown list with agencies should give you data segmentation clear enough to allow you to easily identify members of those agencies at later stage and restructure database to use different model (e.g. organisations tied to individuals through relationships).

Thx,
m

Michał Mach · December 16, 2007, 07:39:20 am

Ha, simultaneous answering. :-)

hallman · December 16, 2007, 09:51:05 am

Thank you both. I'll go with a simple form for now. The agencies are quite independent of each other. Each has its own Web site. One has expressed interest in using CiviCRM for donor management, volunteer management, etc. after we get the Association's site functioning. Having a separate CiviCRM site for each makes sense.

I am using Organic Groups and og_forums. They want a private area for Executive Directors, so I've set up a closed group for that. I think that's the only group we'll have, for now. I looked at OG sync, but think I'm probably better off with just the Drupal Organic groups for now, since we only have one group. I don't have php/MySQL skills.

Thanks again.

Judy

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Author Topic: Need advice on setting up a state-wide site (Read 1510 times)

hallman

Need advice on setting up a state-wide site

Donald Lobo

Re: Need advice on setting up a state-wide site

Michał Mach

Re: Need advice on setting up a state-wide site

Michał Mach

Re: Need advice on setting up a state-wide site

hallman

Re: Need advice on setting up a state-wide site