CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi.  I am the IT guy for a non profit scientific society based in the US.  I am a php/MySQL developer as well, that's what I do most of the time here.  We are evaluating a move to an association management/crm system like CiviCRM.  I have it installed and am starting to play with it. The Drupal version. I have a ton of questions.  I would like to keep a running thread of them here, if that's OK.  If that's against the rules, let me know.

* I would love to see the "public" side of some CiviCRM sites for organizations like ours.  Any links you could offer would be great.

* I especially would love to see membership joining and renewing forms.  Our existing custom ones are fairly complex, as it's often our 1 opportunity per year to gather data (and donations!) from our membership.  We even have options for members to add "gift memberships" for their colleagues while they are renewing.  Also offers options to join sub-groups of our society, such as geographical and topical groups.

* I've played a bit with memberships; it seems that when a member renews, what happens is that the start and end date of the membership record gets updated, rather than a new membership record being created.  Am I missing something?  If not, this is less than optimal as genuine "history" data is lost; it would be hard to tell if some, say, joined in 2005 and then didn't renew until this year.  It would all look like he were a continuous member.

* We offer "family" memberships, where the joining member can include family as members for a bit more money.  How could we handle that?

* Email templates.  We would like to automate some email messaging.  I see the system workflow templates and what's there is good, but we would want more, like a post-renewal "thank you" message.  How to do this?

* Relationship mapping is very important.  In addition to identifying John Doe as an employee of the University of Michigan, we need to identify that he got his BS from Cornell, Masters from Southern Illinois University, PhD at Washington University, post-Doc at UC Santa Barbara and was previously on faculty at Chico State.  And also happened to have Suzy Queue as a mentor (and Suzy was at 4 different universities).  And we would like the members to be able to fill this out themselves. Possible?

Most firms listed here http://civicrm.org/professional have case studies on their pages with links to live sites.

Membership history is stored (in the civicrm_membership_log table) not lost.

Perhaps household memberships will work for your "family" membership: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC40/Membership+Types

I think membership renewal thank yous exist, and if not they could be added via a hook I would think.

Having members fill out their relationship histories may be a bit complicated, but if it can't be done out of the box, it could be custom coded anyhow.

HTH