CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello everybody, first time post here and I'm already getting excited about CiviCRM. I'm new to Drupal7 as well, but learning fast.

I'm working on setting up a site for a local non-profit organization. This site will be a member management system that allows members to log in, join programs/services, add subusers, sign up the subusers to programs/services/sports events.

The biggest problem I've had with Drupal so far has been figuring out how to setup the subusers functionality to allow regular members the ability to add "additional members" to their account. The subusers in this case are generally children and typically won't be accessing the site, so they can't be considered the same as regular members. Also, the regular members need to be able to pay for certain programs/services when added to either their account or to one of their subusers (think parents signing up their kids for sports teams).

Also, there will be several roles, such as Coach, Referee, etc.  A coach, for example, needs to be able to see his teams that he is coaching, send emails to the players/parents on his teams, etc...

Do you all think CiviCRM would be a good fit for this situation? Or do you know of a way I could accomplish these things within Drupal itself much easier? I just found CiviCRM tonight, so I'm still doing a lot of research. It looks overly complicated, which puts me off because we are already climbing a learning curve with Drupal itself.

Thanks for reading, and I hope somebody can provide some thoughts and insight. -Daniel

Thanks for the reply Michael. You are correct in saying that the requirements are complex. But, they can be reduced some if necessary. There is a basic set of requirements that I need to have working, and then if there is extra time, there are a few other things I would like to add.

The "stuff on down the road" absolutely is the type of stuff that I would like to have on the site. Suppose a coach wants to email all of the parents of the players on his teams about a schedule change, or as you said, requesting coaches from the last year/season to coach again, or referees, etc. This sort of functionality seems to be, like you said, built into CiviCRM, which is another reason I'm so interested in using it.

At the very minimum, I need to have "regular members" be able to join the site and join paid programs/services which they can pay for through the site. These users should be able to add "family members" to their account so they have the same access to the paid programs. "Regular members" should be able to add any of their "family members" (children) to sporting teams and pay for those activities accordingly as well.

There are lots of other "requirements," but this is the most important right now. This is actually our senior project in college for the local YMCA, so we are trying to help them out because now all they have is Excel spreadsheets of EVERYTHING. Terrible management going on there...

Do you think CiviCRM would be way overkill? I know there are tons of features in CiviCRM that we won't need, but it seems the features that are included in it might be worth the extra overhead.

Hey there,

Yes - one approach to this would be to have an experiment with CiviCRM for a couple of days and see if it meets your needs using guidance from this forum, etc.  If you do that, one thing you might want to consider is parting with $15 or $30 for two months hosting with someone like civihosting since that would cut out all the figuring out how to host and properly set up civicrm, etc. which is easily going to take up more that $30 of your time.  If after a couple of months, you want to continue, then you can easily migrate your data out of those systems to somewhere else if you want.

The parts I am not clear on (since I haven't dealt with those requirements before on a site though there are certainly other who have on this forum, like peter, etc.) are the smoothest ways to "setup the subusers functionality to allow regular members the ability to add "additional members" to their account" but I suspect there are out of the box ways do this which would be acceptable to you (no promises!).

https://civicrm.org/blogs/petednz/creating-drupal-users-made-easy-single-or-multiple-contacts-civi-imports-and-webforms might be of use here as well.

Michael