CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi all,

I'm part of a group that uses CiviCRM to manage members across the country and has a hack-together add-on for creating localised "groups" that members belong to based on their location.

Can CiviCRM handle this natively? Is there a way to draw a shape or border and have any member within that shape automatically added to that local group? The member should also be allowed to nominate  to be in a different group as well but by default would go into their local group.

I've searched through a number of posts and website and found examples of pulling out groups of members or events based on their physical location but nothing about creating default regions that define which group a member belongs to - and then, of course, being able to do mailouts to those groups.

Using something look Google Maps to show where those groups were and where members lived would be an added bonus!

If you are wanting some mapping interface then i would take a look at what Open Layers can offer. You will need a mapping database that will create the polygons that people would click in. These might be made up of a number smaller polygons, such as postcode areas, or local government or census units. You will need to create a table that maps these polygons to the 'local areas' as you define them. There is a fair bit involved as far as i know but it isn't rocket science.