CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,
We're interested in using CiviCRM for several higher education sites in our university faculty. I've posted the relevant details about our faculty below. I welcome your comments and thoughts.

Regards,
Bjorn

Higher Education Scenario:
Background
We are a faculty in a major research university. We have about 150 professors and 3000 students, as well as 20,000 alumni. The faculty is divided into five departments – each one is semi-autonomous (and sometimes semi-wary of central initiatives , and each one regularly plans events and engages with its community on its own.

The downside of the current system is that we have:

• No database-driven registration system (really!). Most of our events are done by email RSVP, including events with hundreds of participants.
• No meaningful records of past participation in events. The records of participants sit in Excel spreadsheets in hard drives all over campus, or even possibly in email inboxes.
• No way to create communities of interest by potentially targeting past participants. If someone attends a workshop on Youth at Risk, it would make sense that we would advertise future, related workshops to the group that attended that workshop. At the moment, we don’t have the capacity to do so, except where individuals take the initiative to keep their own lists.
• No way to streamline common event-planning tasks, such as mailouts, printing nametags, and other basic stuff.

What we don’t need
CiviCRM is typically used for non-profits. Technically, a university faculty is a non-profit, but we don’t have the same needs an NGO like Amnesty International has. For example, the university already maintains an alumni database, and donation processing is managed through a “central” resource.

So, we won’t be using some of the important, advertised functionality. Nevertheless, if we can get an event management system that is easy to use and can meet all of our needs, that will be enough for us to seriously consider implementing CiviCRM faculty-wide.

What we do need
We need an event management system that allows anonymous users (i.e. people who are not already “members” of any group) to register for events, receive reminder emails, and for events to automatically close on a certain date. We are also very interested in the ability of any system to automate/streamline tasks like mailouts.

We are also interested in a setup that allows multiple faculties to participate and potentially share a common list of users. Rather than installing 9 or 10 instances of CiviCRM, it would be great to install one or two, and share data. That would make a lot of sense as many of the departments will probably be covering similar subject matter in their events.

In the past, this functionality was not available at all, so CiviCRM not only has the possibility to make current tasks easier, but to give us new ways of interacting with users and sharing information.

Questions

• Do you think CiviCRM is a good fit for our needs?
• Based on what I’ve written, is there more that we could be doing with CiviCRM that I’m suggesting?
• Is there anything I should consider in this implementation? Any potential drawbacks? Anything, in your experience, that will help the project to succeed (such as internal buy-in)?
• Is it possible to have a CiviCRM setup that allows multiple departments to have separate events but share user information?