CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I work for the University of Utah and provide technical support to a non-profit organization which is a community outreach partnership between the University of Utah and Salt Lake City, UT, which has as its primary purpose the promotion of higher education in under-privileged and minority areas of the city.  Their official name is University Neighborhood Partners and their website is http://partners.utah.edu.  They are having great success.  One of their primary successes has been in a particular large apartment complex where many refugees have come from Bosnia, Somolia, and surrounding areas.  The group managing the refugee work (known as Hartland after the name of the apartment complex) has a great need for an improved database (their current database really does not do much for them other than maintain contact information and some basic notes) to better manage their work with the refugees.  We have also discussed the benefits that a database for the entire organization could bring in managing all of their events, relationships between volunteer groups, etc.  I am not a database expert and really need help.  I need to know if CiviCRM could accomplish what we are looking for.  I will try to list the needs that aren't spelled out on the CiviCRM website as best as I can.  The Hartland group would like to be able to track and report on their customers' interest in participating in about 9 different programs, tracking attendance in classes which they coordinate with various groups who do the actual teaching, entering and tracking medical information when the volunteer doctors come to provide free clinic sessions with the customers.  The Hartland group acts as the master coordinators for all of the activities/programs.  Each partner program wants to be able to enter and report on their activities by program for each customer.  Hartland would like to be able to then summarize these activities to provide a "success" report back to each organization at regular intervals, especially since their work relies on grants and donations and they need to be able to show what they are accomplishing in order to maintain and acquire new grants and partners.  The overall University Neighborhood Partners organization would like to be able to track all of these various activities and maximize the relationships with partners and volunteers.  Right now, they do not have an easy way to know who all is volunteering and if the volunteers are participating in more than one of the programs being coordinated through University Neighborhood Partners.  Having all of this in a web-enabled database application would be a huge blessing too as this would mean that the partner organizations could work with the data from any location instead of having to be at the Hartland apartment in order to enter their notes, etc.  Does this sound doable?  I am probably forgetting some things, but these should be the primary goals.  Is there anyone who would like to volunteer to help with this?  My workload is fairly large as I support multiple departments which leaves me little time to tackle projects like this, especially when I do not really have the skills for this and would have to find the time to teach myself about all of this in order to implement it.  In any case, though, if CiviCRM will do it, I will do my best to tackle it.  This is not part of my normal support, but I want to help them wherever possible.