CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I work for an organisation that operates on various different levels:
•   1 group of churches
•   3 congregations
•   tens of 'mid-sized communities' called pastorates, 'parented' by congregations
•   hundreds of small groups, some of which are 'parented' by pastorates 

At present these are all Civi groups and they are hierarchied via groups.  Someone might be a member of a congregation, a leader of a pastorate and an administrator of a small group. We need the following capabilities:

•   detailed reporting on people joining and leaving groups over different time periods (as in Civimember summaries etc).  The reporting needs to be hierarchied so that we can report on individual groups/pastorates/congregations/group of churches
•   info accessible on the membership of those groups eg member, leader, administrator, host, venue
•   links on our website so that people can identify groups of interest (currently in place at http://www.woodlandschurch.net/community/pastorates )
•   the ability for group leaders to manage (only) their own groups/pastorates - adding/removing members, changing contact details, emailing groups, adding text notes which can be included on reports alongside individuals' names etc

Within this, we need to use Drupal Organic Groups as we have a Members Area of the website which automatically gives logged in people permission to see associated sites and blogs etc depending on which group they are in.  We are starting to develop reports on groups (although showing the hierarchies is proving a challenge). 

My question is: Which is the best route for us to take long-term? Which solution will be the most flexible and least complicated to develop and use in the long-term?
•   As sophisticated reporting capability already exists in Civimember, is it best to take that route?  Can it deliver fully on the additional elements we need? Can Civimember sync with Civigroups and Organic Groups so that we can get the best of all worlds? 
•   Or should we continue with groups and develop the reporting side ourselves and ways to record leader/member/host etc? 

Many thanks
Lindsey

Lindsey -  We often use OG - and use the Synch ability so that the OG Admin then become ACL Admin to those group members - and actually can save a lot of time in terms of avoiding the process of setting up ACLs

But that means that you need to get people in to the OG in the first place.

Am unsure how you currently 'know' when someone joins or leaves - but one option would be to manage that directly in the OG ie allow them to add/remove themselves from the OG directly (and for Admin to do likewise).

OG Synch then creates the ACL so admin can access their civicrm records - but not people not in the OG.

The record of people being added/leaving the OG is then record on the CiviCRM Group Tab - and then the puzzle is how you do the reporting against that data but at least it is in the DB.

I expect others will throw in other recipes based on their preferred cuisine.

Lindsey
#1 - we tend to use RElationships for what you are describing, though Tags may work better in your case though am unsure how you want to report on this
#2 - OG has a broadcast feature which means the OG Admin can just push a message out to the group members. You can also have OG work with Notifications and thereby have the msg entered as a node on the OG so there is a web record of that msg - which Broadcast does not do. Otherwise your OG Admin will also have ACL access to those contacts in CiviCRM and can use CiviMail
#3 - not seen any evidence of it but have seen discussions pointing to it being possible
#4 - we made a block using Finder so admins can search for either Drupal user name, or civi name, or email - and the result screen gives option to then click through to either civicrm record or drupal record - this means you can search for the Civi name and easily find the Drupal user name to then put in Add Members in the OG

Hi Pete
You mentioned the possibility of using relationships or tags for recording things like 'member of' or 'leader of' a group.  In setting up relationships I can't see how to relate people to a group (as the manual just talks about relationships to contacts).  Is there a straightforward Civi way to do this and, if not, how are you working around this?  With tags I couldn't see how the tag could relate to a particular group either as someone might be a member of one group and a leader of another so we can't just have a 'member' tag or a 'leader' tag as many people are part of multiple groups.

In terms of relationships and reporting in the group context, it's just a field we'd want to view rather than being anything more sophisticated... though we may want to answer queries like 'How many (and which) groups have assistant leaders?', that sort of thing.

No sandbox on the other query as yet, but I've mentioned it to our developer.
Thanks v much
Lindsey

It's the hundreds of individual small groups that we want to record people's relationships with (eg member, leader, host) so I presume that would mean there'd need to be an 'organisation' for each group which would be pretty unruly.  Many people are in more than one group. 

We now have a view which shows all groups and the individuals in them.  I suppose I'm looking for a solution which can show someone's group 'status' (eg member, leader) in a field alongside their listing in the group(s) they're in.  Does that make sense?!