CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am working on cold-call business fundraising (a first for me) for our county's democratic party.  We are on the verge of using CiviCRM (still have lots to learn and don't want to move forward while need-to-know out-weighs what-I-know).  The party has somewhat of a "Business Directory" which contains local businesses and business people that support the party.  They pay/donate a fee to be listed in the directory ($X for a simple line-entry, $Y for a more impressive display ad).

2 points came to mind (and forgive me if the answer is obvious - as I am truly in my infancy with CiviCRM and its capabilities):

• Can the current CiviCRM (2.0) provide a "Business Directory" solution     
  • Allowing the fee to be collected (if not already collected)
  • Displaying the Businesses in the manner they paid for
  • Possibly allowing special feaures (special coupons, allow vendor to send out mailings to members announcing special promotions, etc.)
         
• Could CiviCRM be a solution for what used to be BuyBlue.org?  The site has been down since this time last year, but it looks like the folks at Advomatics (http://www.advomatic.com/buyblue)

Thanks in advance,
John

Denton County Texas

Offering online "purchase" of memberships through the CiviMember / CiviContribute components can probably handle a decent chunk of your requirements. One caveat is that you'll have to wait for version 2.1 to properly support people signing up "organizations" (businesses in your case) for memberships. (This feature is described here in detail: http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-2964

Assuming that businesses in the "directory" are those who have membership - you can use a Profile as Xavier noted to present a searchable listing of those members (you use the "Limit Listings to a Group" feature of profiles). You can read more about Profiles here:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Profiles+Admin

As for "special features" - you may need to use Drupal pages / modules for this - and customize the CiviCRM profile listings to add links. I suspect you'll also want to heavily customize the layout / styling of the profile templates - which you can learn about here:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Customize+Built-in+and+Profile+Screens