Author Topic: help with setting up a form or profile (Read 1059 times)

canadave · April 03, 2011, 07:33:06 pm

Hello all,

I am the technical person for a (very) small tennis club in a small town--about 70 total members, adults and kids. We've been using Excel forever to track basic membership information like name, membership type, address, and phone number, but now I'm trying to set up CiviCRM for them as a trial--it's probably a bit of overkill for our modest needs, but then again maybe not.

The issue I'm having is in trying to figure out how best to set up forms and fields, and how to simplify data entry as much as possible.

To begin with, here's the membership form that all our members fill out each year, in PDF:
(I can't post links, so just combine "liverpooltennisclub" and ".ca" in the URL, click "Membership Info", and look at our Membership Application Form on that page).

Now, ideally, I'd like to be able to take each of these forms, add the member to CiviCRM, and then be able to do searches afterward for things like "show all members who have been with us for more than 5 years", or "show the number of Family memberships we've sold."

The tricky bit here that I'm having trouble figuring out is: we have 5 membership types, two of which are for individual people ("Adult" and "Junior"), two of which involve exactly two people in the same household ("Combo" and "Couples"), and one that involves three or more people in the same household ("Family").

So, the trick is not just adding members, but also making sure that if, for instance, a data entry person comes across a "Combo", "Couples", or "Family" membership form, they also enter as many individual members as are covered under that one membership.

I'm sure that's probably done with a Profile? But I'm not entirely sure how to do that. Ideally, I'm guessing that data entry would involve choosing the membership type (let's say it's "Family"), and then somehow entering as many names as are needed? I just have no clue how to do that (have a look at the membership form I linked above, to see what I'm talking about).

In other words (to sum up): I have a form that asks for a membership type that can involve one or more people. And (I didn't mention this before), a "primary contact person" has to be specified for that membership (someone we can contact for matters regarding that membership). To further complicate matters, that primary contact person does NOT have to be on the membership itself--for instance, a parent might fill out the membership form on behalf of her little boy. She would be the primary contact person, and thus we'd collect her name and address, but HIS name would be the one that goes in the member database. I think.

Can anyone give me a shove in the right direction on how to tackle this?

Thank you very kindly

Dave

canadave · April 03, 2011, 09:57:09 pm

In thinking about it.....

I guess there are some specific questions I could ask, if that'd be easier for folks to answer:

1. If I have, say, four members of a household who are now members of our club under a single "Family" membership, and I've set the "Family" membership type to record $200 in member dues, then how does CiviCRM "know" that our club has only collected $200, and not $800 ($200 from each of the four)? I gather that this is because the four members would be in the Family's "Household", and the $200 is recorded under the "Household's" membership. Fair enough, but then how do I know how many club members there are, if a Household with four people is counted as a single "member"?

2. When doing data entry for these new members, how would this work, in practice? Would our data entry person create four new Individual contacts (one for each person), then create a new Membership, and assign each of the four people to that membership? If so, would that be possible to do all on one form somehow, rather than having the data entry person switch hither and thither among various forms?

In other words, I envisioned a single data entry form where the data entry person can:

1. Specify the membership type.
2. Enter data on the new member, then click an "Add Another Member to This Membership" kind of button if there is more than one member on this membership.
3. Enter data on any subsequent new members that way.
4. Enter "primary contact person" data for this membership, which MAY OR MAY NOT be a member of the club themselves (e.g. could be the parent of a junior member).

Possible?

petednz · April 04, 2011, 03:50:44 am

Hi Dave - some quick pointers that may help.

If you do a Family Membership then set it up as an Inherited Membership so people with the relationship of Family Member of get to inherit - then only $200 is paid - and you can filter your member search for Primary (ie how many households) v Inherited (ie the Family Members)

canadave · April 04, 2011, 07:07:09 am

Hi Pete,

You know, I think you might have helped me over Skype many moons ago, when I first thought about tackling this project for my tennis club...I dropped the project at the time, but I've picked it up again (as you can see); and this time, thankfully, I understand a lot more about the back-end vs. front-end mechanisms of CiviCRM, and all-around usage concepts, than before (I was totally clueless at the time).

Thanks for your latest reply

The only problem I see with it is that two people might be in the same "Household" (that's what you meant by "Family Member" relationship right?), but that's not enough for a Family membership at our club--they need three.

So let's say someone gives us a filled-out membership form and has applied for a Family membership for himself, his wife, and his three kids. To do the data entry, I would enter all five of them as "Individual Contacts" in CiviCRM; then I would create a "Household" that includes all five of them, and assign a Family membership type to that Household, correct?

But now let's say a year later, the kids become disinterested and that leaves just him and his wife--enough for a Couples membership, but not a Family membership. How do I account for the fact that the kids are still in our contact database as Individuals, and are still in this person's "Household", but also prevent them from inheriting "Family" status based on the criteria you suggested?

canadave · April 04, 2011, 07:12:33 am

And another question related to your suggestion--since our Family membership requires three or more members of the same household, then if I set up Family membership to be inherited to members of the same Household, what happens if I have a parent and child who share a household? Normally they would only qualify for "Combo" membership at our club (1 junior and 1 adult), but wouldn't they be wrongly assigned "Family" membership if that membership type is inherited to those who share a Household?

petednz · April 04, 2011, 11:48:41 am

Hi Dave - yes been a long time.

You can control this by using different relationships - create one specifically for your Family Membership - maybe call it Family Membership - or Zebra - then you can still have people 'sharing a Household address' if you want - which deals with all of the above.

Or you could have a Relationship called 'Primary // Secondary" and give one of the members the 'primary' end of the relationship and other family members the 'secondary' end. Then if John stops wanting to play with Dad cos it's soooo boring, you can just cease that relationship and little Johnnie will still be 'son of' or 'child of' dad - or 'Household member' or whatever - but won't inherit a membership

ps - recall some forum posts about when people lose their relationship that their membership was 'not' being updated - but hopefully that bug has been fixed.

pps - this would be so much easier if i could sketch it on a napkin

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Author Topic: help with setting up a form or profile (Read 1059 times)

canadave

help with setting up a form or profile

canadave

Re: help with setting up a form or profile

petednz

Re: help with setting up a form or profile

canadave

Re: help with setting up a form or profile

canadave

Re: help with setting up a form or profile

petednz

Re: help with setting up a form or profile