CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

 When people join our association they are assigned to a one of 250 'chapters' based on where they live.  With our current proprietary CRM all joining is done off-line and we snail mail each person an automatically generated letter that includes the chapter they have been assigned to, plus the name and contact details of the leader of that chapter. 

Answers to previous posts here have indicated that we should set up 250 regular groups for the chapters  (and 250 groups for the group leaders for access control to group lists) and that we will need customisation of civiCRM for automatic group assignment when someone signs up online.

Will that be all we need to be able to reproduce the contents of the the current welcome letter in the automatically system workflow email that goes out when someone takes out a new membership?  I realise I am going to have to learn Smarty (or pay someone to customise the email) but will the relevant fields (group name, group leader name and email/phone and hopefully also link to group webpage) be accessible through the current set up without having to add customs field to each new members record that contains that information (which is how we deal with it in our proprietary CRM)?

 

 

Thanks for the reply Lobo.

I have had a look at the multi-site info, but I don't think it is right for us.  We are trying to unify the groups and branches into one website to create a national "brand" rather than give them websites of their own with a common database.