CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Sorry, I had a minor emergency to take care of. I'm back, and wanted to give a little more information as to what I'm looking for.

We have five sessions of classes (Fall, Winter I, Winter II, Spring, and Summer). Each session has about a dozen classes, each with 10 to 20 students. We see a good number of students coming back each session, but also have a healthy number of new students. The main thing we're looking for is a system to keep track of our classes and students and to handle processing registration and attendance sheets. Right now, we're manually creating spreadsheets - one sheet per class - and entering student names, contact info, liability waiver status, etc.

That means we have to recreate our spreadsheets each session, as some minor thing inevitably changes (time of the class, number of students who can enroll, etc), and we can't track students. We have students fill out whether they're returning when they register (which is all paper- can't accept registrations through our website right now, much to my dismay) but we have no system for actually managing that information. Likewise, we keep track of when students register, but we don't actually have any way of displaying that info (to compare enrollment at a certain time graph trends, etc).

That's our core need. Beyond that, we'd love to be able to manage our mailing lists from the same system. Right now we're using FileMaker Pro, and it seems horribly redundant to be looking at making/buying/licensing this fancy new class registration system and still have a separate mailing system.

I think CiviCRM seems a lot more organized and well put-together than a lot of things we've looked at, but it doesn't look like it'd quite fit the bill. Any other suggestions, either for modifying CiviCRM or looking elsewhere, would be really appreciated.

Thanks!
-Jared