CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Is CiviCase the right way to manage the assignment of solicitors, or should that be in CiviCase?  And if CiviCase, since the documentation is under construction how would this new user get the lay of the land?

Thanks for the reply.  I've read that page but am still wondering what the best/most used place is to track who is soliciting whom.  Any other fund raisers out there who have thought through this?

Cherrick
Rather difficult to know what you are trying to do: if you mean "solicitors" in the US sense of general fundraisers, then you want to look at the CiviCampaign type features for keeping track of who has rung who etc. That's a fairly simple answer.

If you mean solicitors in the UK sense of "lawyers" then  solicitor's practices are not generally not-for-profit/charity/membership organisations which are the sectors that CiviCRM is mainly aimed at. For example, CiviCRM does not (out of the box) handle billing based on time, or invoicing for work done (as opposed to memberships).

However, if you are trying run a Citizens Advice Bureau/pro-bono legal arrangement - particularly if you're dealing with fairly process driven caseloads like immigration, conveyancing or some types of litigation, then the most obvious arrangement would be that both the solicitors/case advisors and the clients are "contacts", and that the case management is via CiviCase. You will have to code up the case flows - for which there is no GUI. The alternative is to run them via (otherwise unlinked) Activities for the contacts, but then the risk of "dropping" someone is somewhat higher.

In that case you would not be using CiviMember, CiviGrant or CiviContribute much/at all - as there is no money changing hands. CiviContribute can be used in a more standalone type of way to collect payments from people in response to invoices, but its not the most obvious way to handle this. CiviCase would, I believe, allow you to see how much time had been spend on a case but there is no out-of-the-box way to bill for this.