CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

hi,
i want to set up a site that will help us to easily contact thousands of social-activists (and supporters). i heard a bit about civicrm, and i want to try and use it.

what we want is:
1) ability to signup quickly (facebook/gmail account) - it's not a MUST, but a very very nice-to-have.
2) easily accessing all of our users via mail (or any other source of wide-spread notification) - MUST.
3) setting-up "group" of supporters like: living area, profession, causes etc...  (not for them to talk to each-other, but to the managers to access to specific groups of users)
4) arranging some sort of polling system to help decide on major events
5) saving "secret" contact information that will be available only to the admins (email, phone number).
6) rewarding activists according to what they do (right now we are doing a mass petition singing, and we want to keep tracing how many petitions every activist got singed. so it's not a real reward, just some sort of point system).
7) creating events (liking them to facebook events).
creating some-sort of forum, and small blogs.
9) managing donations

the idea is that we will finally have some sort of database for social activists, and supporters. the main idea behind it is that we decided that facebook is not a good way to keep in touch with each other, so we need to find a better way to communicate, distribute information, decision making and organizing out-self.

for the first part i'd like only to set up the main database of people with contact information (basic info + profession, secure contact information), and the basic tools to manage this database (CRUD-like app).

i have a cPanel hosting, so it's not a problem to use joomla, drupal or wordpress for the application.

i think that it's a small job for civicrm, but i'm new in it, and i want to set it up as fast as possible (i'd like a basic site up in around 1-2 days). i know it's a lot to do, but i don't think it's impossible.

many thanks,
Itay Mendelawy.

you can also contact me in:
itay.mendelawyATgmail.com

thank you for the detailed answer

the "rewards" system is basicly for the managers to keep track on the activists.
for our example (signing over 100K people on a petition), we want to see how many signatures each activist\supported got (later we'd like to add some sort of ranking, so people will know that if you need some sort of help organizing something, they can contact one of the leading activists for help).

what i got is that civicrm can give me most of what i need out of the box. that's GREAT.

so, other then the forum\blogging, is there a way to put some sort of articles? (if someone want to post some article, or something like head-line news for the main page)

and i forgot to ask it on my main post, but is there a way to import/export data out-of civicrm?

right now i'm setting up a test environment for civicrm on drupal (php is quite the opposite from my .NET programming background ).