CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello all,

We are looking for a CRM solution for our organization, and civi is one of the options we are considering. I've been playing around with civi for some days now, but I am not sure whether our organization's structure can be implemented in civi.

This is how we work (broadly speaking):

Our organisation has about 1000 local groups. We have about 100000 members, which all belong to typically one group, but there are some people who are member of more than one group. Our memberships are on a yearly base.

Each group has one member who is the contact person for the group, the one we contact if we need to know something of the group. We also have the concept of 'functions' which can be assigned to members. E.g. some groups have one or more members responsible for the communication between the group and its municipality, these members have the function 'contact municipality'. The available functions are the same for each group.

We should be able to keep and query the information of past memberships of people. We want e.g. to investigate the evolution of the number of members groups during the last years. We want to be able to get all people that were member of a certain group in a certain timespan. We want to monitor how many people in an average group have a certain function, and how that evolves.

Apart from our current 100000 members, we also want to import contact information of 250000 other people, our former members. We have the information about when they were member, and of which group(s), which we would like to import in the CRM as well.


So here are my questions:

• Can civi handle a big database with +350000 people?
• Do you have a suggestion about how we could implement our +1000 groups? It looks obvious to import them as organizations. But do we have to create a different membership type for each of these groups? Or are there other ways? Maybe we should use a relation for membership instead?
• How would you implement our concept of functions?

Any suggestion is greatly appreciated!

Thank you for the reply. We are aware that we'll need training, help from a civi expert and custom development. But for the moment we are just toying around, because we don't have decided yet which CRM we'll use.

I will look into the things you said, I'll keep you updated :-)