CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

A client has approached me with the following needs, and I'd like to know how well CiviCRM would meet these needs, and where my hurdles might be.  If I use CiviCRM, I will use it with Drupal.  I have not used CiviCRM before, but have read a little about it.

Basic info:
- we would be building something new.
- they have lots of subscriber data that we will import. (seats, subscription name, date, price, plus normal contact info)

Needs for renewing subscribers:
- confirm/change/add to their contact information
- renew their current subscription as-is
- renew their subscription with changes (seating, date)

Needs for renewing and new subscribers:
- add new subscriptions and concerts: could be Pops, Virtuoso, Classics, etc.
- each subscription needs to allow custom fields such as text fields, checkboxes, some to be used to calculate cost.
- donation opportunity
- shopping cart-ish: review what you are subscribing to, enter payment information

- easy single-path user flow, to walk the renewing subscriber through the above steps.

My first impression is to look at each subscription opportunity as a "product" (thinking ecommerce) that is customizable.  But I have no idea yet how well CiviMember or other components could handle this.

I would gladly welcome and suggestions, warnings, or other advice.

Adding to Peter D's comments ...specifically whether to look at Membership vs. Event Participant :

* You can add an unlimited number of custom fields to the standard membership OR participant record, and expose them in a subscriber-facing signup and renewal form using CiviCRM "Profiles".

* If a "subscription" is time-delimited - then using CiviCRM's CiviMember component - with subscription = membership might work best. However, the requirement to include custom fields which have cost implications can currently only be done using the "Price Set" feature which is only available for Events.

* If you need to manage seat assignments for subscribers - then that might be the show-stopper (or require quite a bit of custom code additions) - since you need to know what seats are available etc.

You'll need to spend some time configuring events, looking at custom field functionality as well as membership signup / renewal and price sets in order to see how close you can get.

(subscribers updating their contact info is easily configurable by injecting profile(s) into Drupal's My Account form and / or your event registration and / or membership signup pages)