CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello all,

I am looking at the feasibility of using CiviCRM 4/Drupal 7 for a website that does child sponsorships. See http://www.compassion.com/sponsor_a_child/default.htm for an example of what we would like to do.

I searched the forum and came up with an older post from a year ago however I am not sure if anything has changed since then.

If the status is still that you cannot sponsor another contact in Civi database then what do you think would be necessary in order to get these features possibly as a CiviSponsor Module?

I am aware that you will most likely tell me to go to the Professional Services and pay someone. And I think the organization I am working with would be willing to do that however my question at this point is this.

Does anyone else need these features? Have I laid out the requirements that would meet a broad spectrum of use cases? These features could also meet the needs of people wanting to help their volunteers raise their budgets. So you could sponsor a volunteer etc...

CiviSponsor requirements would be:

- Able to display via views, content to be shown to the public from children/volunteers profiles, such as a pic, name, age, bio.

- A sponsor me link that would add the person to a "cart" in order for more than one child/volunteer to be sponsored.

- Sponsorships are either recurring or one time gifts selectable by admin also an option to show both to be selected by user so that someone could choose to either give once or recurring.

- An admin option to either set the sponsorship fee (like sponsor this child for 40 dollars) or have the fee optional and count it toward a goal (like donate towards John Does monthly expenses and be able to display the funds raised/still needed)

- A relationship would automatically be set between sponsor/sponsored

- The sponsor/sponsored relationship would be able to be used as a filter in views in order to remove or flag children as sponsored/not sponsored.

- The sponsor/sponsored have limited access to each others profiles. Access to which fields is defined by admins. The goal here is to enable communication between them Perhaps this is too social networky and should be done via the drupal interface, if so then I would need a way to perhaps integrate with OG Such as placing all of them in the same group automatically while also syncing that group with a civi group in order for civimailings to work as well.

- Those sponsored as well as those sponsoring would be added to groups(or smart groups) based on this status. This way one could send mailings to all sponsors.

This may not be a complete list of requirements and use cases however I think it is enough to get thinking about it.

Is anyone interested in either working on this or perhaps you need this and could contribute to the development?

Craig

Well we are looking at alternative ways to use contribution pages and views because the children need not be contacts in the civi db. Would of course be better to do it like I mentioned before but if we can find a cheaper way the client wants to go for that. Primarily a budget constraint.

Thanks for your input, I will keep it in mind as we move forward however. I would love to donate this to the community. Wish I was a php developer. (More of a drupal make it work and css it up kinda guy who has always worked with non-profits without big budgets. I am sure I am not the only one here like that

I did recently watch Ryan's keynote http://vimeo.com/groups/software/videos/21681203 on Drupal Commerce and thought this would make things easier to sync up with CiviCRM considering both use rules and views? It would be great if CiviCRM was somehow available as a payment method and address book for Commerce. This would allow a huge amount of flexibility in integrating specific use cases.

Anyhow thanks again for the input and the awesome work you guys do!

Craig