CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am currently evaluating CiviCRM for use by a not-for-profit advocacy group here in Australia.

I have built a VMWare appliance using Ubuntu and bitnami-joomla and installed CiviCRM
and have commenced assessing Joomla/CiviCRM against my client's requirements.

So far CiviCRM is looking really good but I do have a few questions.

Member Electorates

The first question is about how to link a member to their representative politician at both state and federal level.

I have textual lists of all politicians in:

1. State lower houses;
2. State Upper House;
3. Federal Lower House and,
4. Federal Upper House.

My first question is: How do I load these lists into CiviCRM and then link each member to the relevant political representative?
There is a distinction between the current politician and the electorate as a permanent geographic feature. So, the actual politicians
could be loaded as contacts with a suitable tag but how does one manage the actual electorate as an entity on its own?
Of course, one would like to be able to organise mailouts and campaigns based by sending emails to a specific electorate's members.

I have done lots of Google searching etc but it is not clear to me how such a common thing is handled best in CiviCRM.

Mapping

I also have the geographic regions which I can use in mapping via Google. However, it looks like CiviCRM's Google Maps still requires a Google API which, as I understand things, has not been required by Google since version 3 of their API.  So, the second question is: Is this the case and can one use CiviCRM without a Google API key? If not, is it better to use a Joomla Google plugin in preference to CiviCRM?s

Host CRM
I chose Joomla as the host CRM as it seemed simpler but I notice that CiviCRM seems to have been developed primarily for Drupal. What advantage does Drupal offer over Joomla that I should be aware of?

regards
Simon

PS I have added an image showing my Electorates Custom Fields and elements. Instead of free format text I would like to associated each field with a custom pulldown menu. Is this possible?

Pete,

I have hacked around and worked out how to create the pulldown menus for manual selection, but auto-assignment would be better
as long as postcode is a required field.

I don't want a solution that requires programming. It is not that I do not know PHP (I can program in a large set of other languages) but it is because I want the solution for my client to have minimum exposure to programming (that is not the same as saying "no programming", but targeted programming as and when it is really needed).

I am a database guru so I can see how auto-assignment could occur via triggers. Is this how you do it or do you have some PHP? I guess your approach would need modification depending on the number of electorates (for my client federal - 2 - and state - 1 and sometimes 2 - are required but nothing local).

Quite happy to discuss this aspect off line via email if you desire simon at spatialdbadvisor dot com dot au

regards
Simon