CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

First of all, you should be able to do all you describe with CiviCRM. Should be a fun project :-)

It is difficult to give you tips on what to do as there are a lot of options in CiviCRM you could use depending on your detailed requirements, and in many cases there are more roads to the solutions you want. My advise would be to expect a pilot phase in your project first. Start with a vanilla CiviCRM, take the user guide (http://book/civicrm.org/user) and make notes on the way.

The household situation you describe could be reflected in the household and individual contact types in CiviCRM. And you could set up a membership type for individuals and one for families. What I do not really distill from your description if a membership actually has a status in your organization and people pay for it, or if people register and pay for each individual event.

The programs could be set up as memberships or as events. depending on your needs. The only recommendation there is play with it during the pilot phase and expect to retrace your steps every now and then.

The different 'status' people can have (volunteer, referee, coach etc) could be reflected in groups or tags, and you probably want to set up relationship types for the different relations between people/households/organizations.

Have fun! Hope to hear how it goes on the forum :-)

Usually this is done by enabling a Profile eg Name and Address to be used for Drupal User create and edit.

From memory this was a default with civicrm so would think you would already see that civi Profile showing at /user/register

Try not to confuse 'contacts' with 'members'

You don't need people to become members just to have them in the database.

So when someone signs up for an account, and fills in the civi profile that is used for Drupal User create, then they become a 'contact'. And that should be enough at that point imo.

Once they become an Authenticated User then they can access content in drupal that you manage via some access control module in drupal.

If you then want other information withheld from them, but accessible to real 'members' then you can do that by assigning specific Drupal Role to people who are Members.

Hope that helps untangle things a bit for you

I don't have a good answer about Households but here are some thoughts.

- you can use webform-civicrm to let people add other contacts, and register a 'relationship' between them which can then be used for other purposes

- you can set people to 'share an address' rather than formally create a 'Household' contact that they are each connected too

It might help if you write out some scenarios of what you want to be able to 'offer' to contacts/users if they do want to include other 'family members'

Once again- the UI is confused by multiple terms for the same thing:
IDEALLY, To Clarify: (more experienced users- please help with the nomenclature here)
A VISITOR is someone who visits the site- and doesn't do anything- reads, etc- they can graduate to a USER:
USER: is someone who has been granted access control to the site- using the CMS as a portal, each CMS has it's own ACL structure.
They can be a USER without doing anything within CIVI- although, depending on ACL settings, they could become a contact (Wordpress doesn't have tightly integrated ACLs yet- I believe both Drupal and Joomla do).
Within CIVI- you become a contact- there are basic essential fields that contained within CIVI- but, it's hard to keep track of them, because they don't appear in one place where anyone can find a complete list of them- unlike custom fields added by users- often times users add identical fields because they don't see the list of already existing fields- major UX design flaw that's causing grief).
As a CONTACT - which is basic data about an INDIVIDUAL, you can be lumped into all kinds of other taxonomies- Households (a grouping of people at the same physical address), ORGANIZATIONS- a grouping of people who are all committed to a similar goal which has a LEADER (unspecified in CIVI by nature) or into GROUPS (either static or SMART) or TAGS, or into "RESERVED RESPONDENTS" (IDK who came up with this name- should be shot).
A MANAGER (non-existent status) is a person who has access to CIVI at a higher level- to do admin tasks.
Then there are things your contacts can do. Sometimes we call them ACTIVITIES, CAMPAIGNS, SURVEYS, EVENTS, MEMBERSHIPS, PETITIONS, CONTRIBUTIONS, MAILINGS, CASES, GRANTS etc-
Some of these are voluntary- some are assigned- unfortunately, the word TASK or MISSION as a subset of CAMPAIGNS doesn't exist in the civiworld- so they are confusing.
MEMBERSHIP: Paid or unpaid, is a permission to do something for a set period of time.
EVENT: Is something you attend, that happens at an exact time. It can be recurring, or one off- but, you should be able to take attendance, possibly charge, and track by contact.
ACTIVITIES: These should be clearer- these are something to do with updating a contact info.
TASKS/MISSIONS (non-existent at this time) are assignments of activities to someone who is working on a CAMPAIGN, assigned by a LEADER as part of an ORGANIZATION to achieve a campaign goal.
i know this doesn't help dccrodell right now- but, it's what's missing to help new MANAGERS get civi to work.
Sorry if this is a rant- but- I'm looking at the questions- and trying to find the common language that's needed to stop confusing people.

Ah- the contact problem.
It depends on if you confuse a contact with an activity.
No- corporations aren't contacts. You have people at the Organization- which you can contact.
A household- is not a contact- an activity- is reaching out to the household- but, a household is of no use to anyone if you aren't talking to people- which are contacts.

A favorite quote of mine- "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one."
And- as to organizations- yes- they need leaders- otherwise you are talking to the wrong people- or don't have the authority to talk to them. Think about it a bit.
But- there are literally 100 different CRM systems out there- and most of them run into this same basic flaw-
CRM is about working with people. Only people can be gauged and measured and coerced- and that's what we're trying to do.

Semantics suck- but, you have to think about it from the position of one-to-one selling- always. IMHO.

One thing I am hung up on is I have seen in some videos mentioned that you can create a form field of something like "Number of Household Members," and create as many contact creation forms as necessary to create those household members. Is this done strictly in webform, using conditionals? I am going through the Webforms documentation, but haven't quite gotten to that yet, if it is there.

Not sure if i am grasping the right straw here, but when making a webform-civicrm form, you can eg add a Contact 2, in the civi tab, with the required fields/relationships etc, then do all the nice config in webform, then when you have it so that 'Household contact #1' (for example) fieldset is how you want it to show, on the webform tab you can then Clone that fieldset, which clones both the civicrm and webform settings, so you get Contact 3 etc.

Then if you want you can just set those as 'collapsed' so that Person A fills in the form, adds Contact 2, then if required expands and adds Contact 3, etc.

I do agree with TheNextWave that some of the concepts of contacts/users/individuals/etc is confusing, and once you get your head wrapped around what those terms really mean (and don't mean), it is much easier to make them work for your situation.

Not sure what is currently offered by way of a Glossary of Terms (and I don't think that solves NextWaves issues since his seems to be more than just a critique of nomenclature) but if you think that a Glossary needs to be easier to find, or improved, then please, both make the suggestion, and have a go at improvements