CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,
I am trying to "sponsor" CiviCRM/CiviEvent in my organisation, but currently I am struggling to both a) learn it and b) bend it to my needs.

In the few major events we organize in a year we usually invite our contacts that must reply to us to confirm their presence to the event.

What I expected to be able to do with CiviEvents was:

• import our contacts
• send them an invitation for an event
• let them (and only them) register for the event

I have read some documentation and searched the forum, and I am beginning to think that this is not possible using current CiviEvent version. If I did not miss something, and this is infact something that cannot be done, I would like to suggest this workflow as a new feature.

Thanks for the reply, Lobo.

If I understand you well, I have to
1) make each contact a Drupal user (but is syncing drupal and civicrm possible with dupal 6 <=> civicrm 2?),
2) send an e-mail to them using civimail (or use traditional mail for those without e-mail) where I disclose the link for the registration page
and
3) ACL/use drupal permissions to allow only the selected users to register
?

One problem with the solution you propose: how do I manage contacts without e-mail (the GREAT majority of my contacts)? If I recall well, drupal user_import module requires an email address, and the civievent registration page uses e-mail to identify the registering user.

So, perhaps my request now is similar to "Multiple participant registration considered too email-centric" http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,4915.0.html in that I am probably asking to make contacts less email-centric?

our online event registration solution is email-centric (it is an online solution after all). Getting around it in the short term is not a trivial issue

I do not think that an online solution have to be email-centric, and removing this "feature" could probably open CiviEvent to a larger audience. I guess a lot of organizations like the one I work for (mainly old ones with a long history of ordinary mail contacts) do have a large base of supporters' addresses and other data but only a small percentage of e-mail for those contacts.
I do understand that is not a simple task to remove the email-centricness from online registration, but don't you think that it's probably worth a discussion between developers to see if it can be done?

contact management is not email-centric (IMO). your org can use civicrm without knowing email addresses of the contacts.

You are right, Lobo: sorry for my wrong statement.

However as an open source project we do rely on community contributions to add additional features. Maybe your org (or a group of similar orgs) will step up and contribute towards building this feature

As we are preparing the budget for the next year I could try to find a way to get some money for this: could you please quantify in some way the amount of money needed to sponsor this, giving a minimum and maximum value, so I could present a proposal to my director?
But please keep in mind that I work for a humanitarian relief organization, not for a Fortune 500 firm 

Thanks Lobo,
this is enough for me to start a discussion with my boss.
I must tell you that, being my employer the Italian branch of an international organization, i think it will not be easy to convince him to hire professional services from the USA... but I will try anyway.