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  • Best practices for categorizing/organizing alumni database
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Author Topic: Best practices for categorizing/organizing alumni database  (Read 1599 times)

nikjft

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Best practices for categorizing/organizing alumni database
April 07, 2008, 06:48:01 am
I'm looking for some guidance/best practices on how to categorize people in an alumni database using a combination of groups, tags, and relationships.

I'm setting up an online alumni database/system using CiviCRM, and also using CiviContribute and (later, maybe) CiviMail for email promotions. This system will not only how alumni, but also past and current teachers, students, and the parents of students and alumni.

Right now, I'm just trying to set up the basic framework. My intention is to have the site be fairly self-service, so alumni can log in themselves, create profiles, and search other users' profiles to meet up or get back in touch. (Just using contact forms for that, I don't want to publicize personal data to non-admins/volunteers)

My goal is to categorize alum as follows:

  • Years of attendance (first, last)
  • Role in school during attendance (student, faculty, parent of student, volunteer)
  • Relationships to other members (parent of student x, sibling of student y)
  • Privacy opt-in/out (to a granular level, so we have prefs for fund raising, requents for volunteering, newsletters, etc.)
  • Interesting in volunteering in multiple categories (fund raising, mentoring, on-site volunteering, teaching/lecturing)
  • Basic demographics (location, age, etc.)

I expect for an administrator to identify potential volunteers, contact them when we need them, and add them to groups as appropriate to maintain contact with them.

My hunch is that a lot of this is just custom fields, and I'll just search/filter by them as necessary, and use smart groups for some of it.

Where I'm particularly stuck is on the role in school and explicit interpersonal relationships.

Relationships seem well handled by relationships (duh). But so does role in school, or so it seems to me. Alternately, role can just be a tag or even a custom field. (Someone CAN have many roles)

How should I best categorize all this information to ensure a robust database that's easy to use for both the registrant and for admins/volunteers who need to keep in touch with these people?

Dave Greenberg

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Re: Best practices for categorizing/organizing alumni database
April 07, 2008, 11:37:49 am
The Relationships data model is well suited to handle BOTH "Relationships to other members" (parent, sibling...) as well as "Role in school". The benefits of using them for "Role in school" are:
- You can create relationship types for each role
- You can apply multiple relationships with start and end dates - and so record a sequence of roles over time (Student from 9/1/2000 - 6/20/2004, Volunteer from 9/1/2007 - ...)

HOWEVER - there are caveats / drawbacks:
- You can not currently expose relationships to self-service input / updates.
- Searching on relationships is quite basic / limited. This could be addressed by creating or adapting a custom search focused on the relationship-related searching you'll need. Also, Smart Groups based on custom searches are possible in 2.0 and will be tested / improved more thoroughly in 2.1.

An alternative for tracking Roles would be to create a custom data group for each role, which includes the effective start and end dates. Note that you could do this w/ a single custom data group where the Role was selectable. The new (2.0) data model supports multiple instances of a custom data group set of values for a single contact. HOWEVER, this is not yet supported in the interface (scheduled for 2.x). Hence, you might need to go w/ separate custom data groups unless you're up for helping/contributing code for multiple instances case.
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xavier

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Re: Best practices for categorizing/organizing alumni database
April 07, 2008, 02:19:48 pm
Hi,

There is more than one way of doing it (ie. civicrm is as good as perl ;).

My own personal rule of thumb is to use relations when it is functionally a relation (keep in mind the limition as just described by dave), tag for "soft" categories (eg interested in volunteering) and group for hard ones (student, parent, sibling...)


    * Years of attendance (first, last)
    * Role in school during attendance (student, faculty, parent of student, volunteer)
relationship (or membership ?)
    * Relationships to other members (parent of student x, sibling of student y)
relationship
    * Privacy opt-in/out (to a granular level, so we have prefs for fund raising, requents for volunteering, newsletters, etc.)
Not sure about your need
    * Interesting in volunteering in multiple categories (fund raising, mentoring, on-site volunteering, teaching/lecturing)
tags
    * Basic demographics (location, age, etc.)
standard tags (location, birthday)+ custom tags



Good luck !
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nikjft

  • Guest
Re: Best practices for categorizing/organizing alumni database
April 08, 2008, 02:21:53 pm
Thanks for the great advice!

I ended up using tags for school roles just because of the interface. The roles system is a bit kludgy if someone is a member of multiple roles.

Privacy, years of attendance, etc. are all handled as custom data types in profiles.

Then I have various groups and roles set up to manage volunteers and administrators.

I've got to say, I'm absolutely floored by how powerful CiviCRM is. I'm only just getting my feet wet, and I keep finding more and more that I can do with it!

Dave Greenberg

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Re: Best practices for categorizing/organizing alumni database
April 08, 2008, 02:46:01 pm
Thanks for the nice feedback. One really helpful thing you can do to support the project is to post a description of how you / your organization is using CiviCRM on the Showcase section of this forum. These real-life examples (with as much detail about the organization and your processes as you have time to share) are really helpful for other folks evaluating whether CiviCRM is a good fit for their organizations. :-)

http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/board,4.0.html
Protect your investment in CiviCRM by  becoming a Member!

nikjft

  • Guest
Re: Best practices for categorizing/organizing alumni database
April 08, 2008, 03:14:02 pm
Once we go live, I'll be sure to do that.

There's definitely a need for more examples/best-practices. It's taken me quite a few hours just to wrap my head around the intersection of custom data, groups, profiles and security! I'm happy to contribute!

Pages: [1]
  • CiviCRM Community Forums (archive) »
  • Old sections (read-only, deprecated) »
  • Support »
  • Using CiviCRM »
  • Post-installation Setup and Configuration (Moderator: Dave Greenberg) »
  • Best practices for categorizing/organizing alumni database

This forum was archived on 2017-11-26.