CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi everyone!

I'm new to CiviCRM, and I have a use case that I'm pretty sure will require some customization, and am looking for some guidance.

The organization I'm helping is hosting an event.  There are straight ticket sales, which are straightforward.  There are also sponsorships, where the individual/organization gets special mention in the event materials.  They also get a certain number of tickets.  At the time they sponsor, they may not yet know who to give the tickets to.

1) It seems like event participant registrations are not the place to track sponsorships, since the participants are not yet known.  Is this correct?
2) My partner has taken the step of creating these as contributions, which are divorced from the event, which is less than ideal, since it's harder to track revenue from the event.
  a) Is using contributions the right way to go?
  b) Is there currently a way to tag the event ID on the contribution record, or do we have to add a custom field?
  c) Would the best practice be to add a custom field to make available to all contributions, or create a contribution subtype and add a field just to that?
3) I'd like to provide ticket codes with a sponsorship that the sponsor could give out.  Ideally CiviCRM would track one code for each sponsor with the total number of slots available.  Then on event participant registration, an individual could provide that code, and the system would decrement that count.  We could print this info and track who shows up under which sponsor at the door if they didn't register online beforehand.
  a) I'm sure this isn't supported out of the box.  Am I wrong?
4) At the time of sponsorship, we would like to collect two sets of contact information:  the individual entering as well as the organization they are affiliated with, if applicable.  We would also collect whether the sponsorship should be associated with the individual or organization.  So 3 things happen:
  a) The individual and organization are created or updated.
  b) A relationship is created between each, if it doesn't already exist.
  c) The contribution has its contact ID set to the appropriate contact.  If it's the organization, then there's a separate contact ID field that says which individual in the organization to contact re: this sponsorship.  Note this is separate from the primary contact for an organization, since this is just for the scope of the sponsorship.
  i) This is obviously not supported.  Where would I start to hack this?  My thoughts were to customize the PHP and TPL to add fields for these, then do the appropriate thing.  I'd also customize the contribution subtype (if using subtypes) edit and view pages to make relationships more explicit for internal users (i.e. create an individual, then an organization, then the contribution subtype instance associating each of those).
    1) Is this the best entry point for customization for this?

Thank you all very much for any and all help!

Awesome!

1) So it appears from your answer to number 4 that the workflow is to use CiviMember to guide the user through the process of creating an individual membership for themselves, an organization membership (if applicable), then proceed to CiviContribute to create the sponsorship, using the "on behalf of" feature to associate the contribution to the organization.  The individual would always be the contact on the contribution.  Is this interpretation correct?

2) If so, the workflow is a little clunky for us.  We aren't using CiviMember to allow the public to register yet; this is later on the growth plan.  We would prefer to allow donors to be low engagement and simply give us money .  The fact that the workflow is over several screens is less than ideal; we would rather get everything on one page and just do the right thing in the background.  What's the best way to do this?  I'm new to CiviCRM, Smarty, and PHP, but my enterprise OO instincts tell me to create a custom template with a backing custom view object calling a custom BAO that does the right thing calling the other standard BAOs involved.  Is this the right approach?

Thanks!
Alyssa