CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi all, I am working with a group named "Community Recovery Team" (non-profit).

We are in Southern California and have fallen to wild fires in the past years.  And predictions are that we will again soon.  Initially in the 2003 wild fires, I built a Microsoft Access database that served well, but this is 2009.

We want to put up a web based application so that all fire centers can tie in together.

I did a search for disaster and fire, and saw some posts that talk about this, but not fully.

My question is - will CivicCRM fill the bill?

And to help, I guess the three primary things we would need would be:

1.  The ability to enter clients (fire victims), their needs, and incident logs.  IE - client calls on a particular date, with a particular need, they then call on another date with another (different) need.  We would need to track those calls and assure all needs were being met and response completion logged.

2.  We have several centers, we would need to tie them in so a victim cannot register at more then one center.  This may be a slam dunk in how we enter the data (I am not sure yet as I have not looked at depth in to the program yet).

3. Tie organizations and companies to victims (social services, insurance companies, etc.)

Please forgive me if it looks like I haven't done enough homework on this yet, I have already looked at numerous options, and am getting bleary eyed...

Thanks for your help!!

Ron

Thanks lobo,

I intended to address the SAHANA in my email, but it got so long I didn't want to overpower the possibility of a response on my main question.

I have installed sahana, and from all accounts it looked like a great product.  But, after two separate installations, there seems to be a bug that I cannot meet the challenge on.  It is only on one module, but an important one (Volunteer module).

I kinda gave up on it - one because they shut down the forum, and only have a wierd wiki going, and two, there has been little activity since the 2007 sunami (or some other disaster that escapes me right now).

Most activity was in "engineer" speak very technical and little detail.  But their bug list was huge.

I don't want to turn anyone off to this software - it is a great effort by many to get it to this point.  It's shortcoming though is lack of good documentation and a forum where real people talk like happens here.

But, again thank for your response on CivicCRM - it seems to be a well developed and supported open source.

Ron