CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi there,

I work with a few non-profit organisations in the UK that are called "local infrastructure organisations" or LIOs - they are umbrella organisations that deliver services and support to other non profit organisations in a specific locality.

LIOs deal with organisations and the people that work for these organisations.  For LIOs the role that the individual plays at the organisation is key, and this puts a certain emphasis on the way that the LIO wants to view and use their data.  Here’s a couple of examples of the kind of work they do.

* They put on training events for staff of local non-profits, for instance, Mary Collins from Age Concern attends a training event on "Effective fundraising".  The LIO wants to ask questions like, what sort of organisations are attending fundraising events, or "what organisations working with older people have not sent someone to a fundraising event this year". 
* They help organisations work effectively by ensuring they have the right policies in place.  The LIO organises a series of "organisational health checks" (think case management!)  that consists of a series of standard tasks, for instance helped Green Lanes Youth club put in place a volunteering policy.  The LIO can then report on how many organisations they have helped put in place organisational policies this year.

I've done a bit of work on applying CiviCRM to the way these organisations work and come up with a list of things that (I think I'm right in saying) CiviCRM can't do and my thoughts on how to mould Civi to cater better for these needs.  Some of them are probably sensible requests – others might be poorly thought out.  I hope they are useful and would be very grateful for any suggestions on how to implement this functionality, or ways to do this with already existing functionality.  To start, I’ll concentrate on functionality that relates to individuals and organisations.

1) Be able to set individuals to use their employer address by default.  I imagine this would be implemented in a similar way to "use household address".

2) Organisation’s activity tab also shows activities delivered to staff of the organisation.  (I've already modified the relevant activity search to make this possible by adding an extra variable to the function call which is an array of the relationships you would like to retreive).  You could also use this, for example, to set a household activity tab to show events that members of that household attended.

3) Be able to control the visibility of profile fields dependent on the value of another field.  E.g. “hide phone number from public directory if age is less that 18”.

4) Assign an employee of an organisation to be the "main point of contact” for that organisation and use this person’s name in all correspondence (mailing labels) etc. addressed to the organisation, and in an online organisation directory

5) (perhaps slightly related to the above) a new custom data type of “contact” that you can filter by type of contact and/or relationship.  e.g. "a field on an organisation page called “First Aid Representative” that allows you to select from a drop down of all staff at the organisation.  (How this relates to relationships will need some thinking through

I have some more feature requests for events, case management and deleting, but will leave those for another post!

PS.  This post fits in with some pages that some people in the UK been creating on the wiki http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCRM+for+Local+Infrastructure+Organisations+(LIOs)+in+the+UK

Michael

Good to have the idea of a new Contact Type for 'Officers/Roles' being raised again. I had hoped it would get some pick up in the development of civiCase but haven't been able to monitor those developments at all.

Secondly, I have just run in to exactly this need too

a) ability to specify that certain relationships are one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-one (as opposed to implicity many-to-many as they are now).  This is necessary because implicit in the concept of a default contact is the idea that there can only be one per organisation.  In practice this would mean that if you have one person A as the default contact for organisation X and you try and assign person B to this role, CiviCRM says, Person A is already assigned as the default contact for organisation X.  You can only have one person assigned as the default contact.  Would you like to [Keep A] or [Update to B].

b) ability to specify that you want corrsepondence (in an email/mailing) sent to a relationship to the organisation if this relationship exists, and if it doesn't just to the organisation.

I think you articulated it really clearly - madman or not.

Hi there,

Many thanks for taking the time to read and respond to these - really very useful.

Has made me think about the different methods required for implementing different functionality and I realise that there are some gaps in my knowledge when it comes to understanding the best way to contribute to OS projects - taking advanatage of patches, backporting functionality slated for upcoming releases, ensuring my customisations don't affect upgrades / can be integrated back into later versions easily, etc.  I know that is general OS stuff, but any advice / pointers on that gratefully received.

In terms of the specifics, I think the best way now is to take up separate items up in individual threads...

Michael