CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm very new to CiviCRM and have been playing around with it to see if it will meet the needs for our school's PTO.  It seems really flexible with many different ways to accomplish similar tasks!  I'd appreciate workflow advice that will help me think through what I'd like the system to do.

The thing I'm trying to do is a) sign people up for their annual membership and b) capture their volunteer interests and committee interests (checkboxes).  I was planning to use a Contribution Page to handle membership (which is free).  One thought I had was to create a Profile for the fields we need for volunteer and committee interests.  This worked great, but I can't find where those data are stored.  My plan was that I would search for everyone interested in the Fundraising Committee and add them to a Fundraising Committee group (even making it a Smart Group in future).  However, I tested with 2 users and had both check the fundraising committee box.  When I search for it in the Advanced Search, I see the field to search on but get no results.  Any idea on where I went wrong here?

My other thought was to keep membership signup and the volunteer signup separate.  So, the membership signup would still ask about committee preferences (so I still need to work out the scenario above).  But, I would have a separate volunteer interest form (a profile as a stand-alone form).  What I don't quite get about that is if the profile is a stand-alone form in one of my Joomla articles, how does it get tied back to that Contact record that was created by the membership?  Or, would I need to ask for name/address, etc. on the volunteer form so that on the backend I can dedupe and merge?

Thanks for any advice - the point of my long-winded query was to ask about the best way to handle membership sign-up, gather committee and volunteer interests, and then populate groups based on those interests

Hi Beanfruit,

I developed a Civi site both for our K-8 school community and my daughter's arts organization with an extensive number of forms (emergency contact forms, volunteer interests, waivers, fundraising surveys, enrollment applications, tour sign-ups, etc.) using Drupal, Civi, Webforms and Webform CiviCRM Integration (http://drupal.org/project/webform_civicrm). I don't know if you're open to Drupal over Joomla (and I don't know whether or not there is a Joomla equivalent), but I found such flexibility and power with this set up.

Here are some sample workflows for various scenarios that I've been faced with:

1) For the arts site, parents create their own Drupal accounts which automatically creates a Civi account for them. Once they've signed up, they get an automatic email with a link to fill out their forms. They sign in with their username and password, and are presented with a set of custom fields to enter their data. They also fill out their student's data, which creates a new Student contact record in Civi (through the magic of the Webforms Integration module). Webform Integration sets up with Child/Parent Relationship automatically. I'm not using this particular functionality, but they can also be added to Civi groups based on their responses, fulfilling that need for you.

2) For our school site, each parent is assigned an account by the administrator. When they're logged in, they can access several Webforms that all feed into Civi.

I am using the Contribution form only for actual contributions. I've found the Webform/Webform Integration so easy and so much more flexible in terms of layout and design of the forms, that I'm using it for everything else.

Whatever you find works for you in the end, I really recommend Civi in a school setting. For our school, we took the entire application process online. For the arts program, we went from paper-based forms only to everything online in less than one month's worth of work (all volunteer after-hours work, as well). And with everything searchable and reportable, it's a huge boon to productivity for a non-profit with only one full-time staffer to manage hundreds of students each summer.

Good luck!
Lisa

Hi Beanfruit,

I developed a Civi site both for our K-8 school community and my daughter's arts organization with an extensive number of forms (emergency contact forms, volunteer interests, waivers, fundraising surveys, enrollment applications, tour sign-ups, etc.) using Drupal, Civi, Webforms and Webform CiviCRM Integration (http://drupal.org/project/webform_civicrm). I don't know if you're open to Drupal over Joomla (and I don't know whether or not there is a Joomla equivalent), but I found such flexibility and power with this set up.

I really appreciate you sharing your workflow examples Lisa.  We're pretty set on Joomla, but I know there are a ton of forms components so maybe I can do something similar in Joomla.  I'm still trying to figure out whether we want to let people just fill out their membership and do something like you suggest where they get a link to fill out more information...or whether we try to get them to give us all the info at one time (captive audience and all).  Thanks for your advice!