CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi all:

I work for a small non-profit and we are using an adaptation of the "Raising More Money" fundraising model.

Part of this model is having an annual breakfast fundraising event where you invite your members and they are encouraged to invite their friends and family or anyone else they think might be interested in supporting the organization.  This is a great way to bring new people into the fold--the breakfast is free, but everyone is asked for a donation at the end of the event.

Anyhow, it becomes important for us as an organization to track who invited people to the breakfast event that actually came.  This helps us know who our good "networkers" are who introduce new people to our organization.  It also helps our good networkers to know who they've invited over the years, so they don't keep inviting the same person every year, for instance,  or so that the networker knows who of the people she invited actually gave a donation.

I think that CiviCRM alreay has a great way to track this kind of thing, through the relationships function.  We could define a new relationship called "Invited to Breakfast 2007" (one direction) and "Invitee of Breakfast 2007" (other direction).  Then we just create this relationship between the "networker" and the perople that "networker" brought to the Breakfast 2007 event.

This isn't a complete solution, because as of now (as I understand it) there isn't a way to query relationship data through the built-in search screens (I'm using 1.6, I think).  However, I can use another reporting tool to query that information and basically build a summary report that shows each "networker" and who they invited to the Breakfast 2007 event.

Does anyone else have any thoughts about this kind of use of relationships?

Thanks.

This isn't a complete solution, because as of now (as I understand it) there isn't a way to query relationship data through the built-in search screens (I'm using 1.6, I think).  However, I can use another reporting tool to query that information and basically build a summary report that shows each "networker" and who they invited to the Breakfast 2007 event.

The current release (1.7) includes searching by Relationships (under Advanced Search).