CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi Eriks

Welcome to CiviCRM!

CiviCRM is a fairly flexible CRM system geared to the needs of non-profits and similar organisations. It doesn't include, off the shelf, the sorts of tools and functionality that you outline. However,CivicRM needs to be run alongside a content management system (CMS) -currently it integrates with Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla - so some of the tools and workflows you need could potentially be accommodated within the CMS.

When scheduling a Board or committee meeting, be able to create a meeting agenda outline and attach documents to the agenda as a whole or to individual agenda items.

This is certainly something that could be done using the CMS. and linked to from your CiviCRM event info page.

Members can RSVP online, download and review attachments, and make notes or add comments to the agenda or specific agenda items after receiving the meeting notification

An event can be created and members can sign up to the event using CiviCRM. They'll be able to read/download any documents that have published in the CMS to which they have access privileges. As for posting content by way of notes and comments or editing the agenda, this can all be done within the CMS.

Be able to attach comments and personal notes to meetings, individual agenda items or documents

See above. If by personal notes you mean private such that others can't view those notes, this is doable, but may best be done offline (for example with a pen on a printed copy of an agenda - appropriate technology)

Deferred agenda items and discussions automatically carry over to the next meeting's agenda

This would be a specific bit of functionality that would probably best be implemented within your CMS.

Distribute Minutes via eMail link to the committee site or via pdf

CiviCRM can send email to targeted groups, with links and/or attached files.

Parent committees have read-only access to sub-committee info, membership and meeting minutes

Again this can done using user access controls within your CMS.

I think your list is more about content and access to it, than it is about contacts and managing those contacts. Hence my focus on the content management system (CMS) rather than the contact management system (CRM).

I'd say that much if not all of what you want to do could be done with Drupal (I can't speak for other CMSs that I don't know so well), and if you wanted to do lots of contact management, either as another aspect of the organisation's work or if you had lots of committees and boards and needed something to assist in managing all those contacts, then CivicRM could be a useful tool to integrate into your CMS.

Hope this is helpful.