Recurring/Multi-Session Events – share your opinions so this MIH works for you

[LindseyM]

Civi deals well with one-off events but if your organisation/client runs linked events such as training courses with several sessions, you probably do time-consuming workarounds or use unsupported Drupal modules.  I'm trying to kickstart core developments to handle this scenario by identifying potential seed funders.  At the same time I want to ensure that developments meet the needs of the community so please take a moment to share your opinion.
 
Possible functionality is listed at the end of this post. I’d appreciate your comments on any of it, but particularly on the suggested parcelling of events into points 1, 2 & 3 below. Do those definitions make sense to the scenarios and challenges you face?  An earlier blog drew out suggestions about managing volunteer slots and resource booking.  This will not be part of the initial Make It Happen but could subsequently be incorporated, funding permitting. Any opinions are gratefully received (as are funding offers – email lindsey.mansfield@woodlandschurch.net).

1. Events with multiple sessions - An event such as a training course with several sessions and a defined start and finish date. It may last for 10 weeks but a participant registers once (either at the start or as the course progresses).  There would be attendance fields for every session and the ability to add a note to the participant record and session.

2. Repeating Events - The same event that repeats on several occasions eg a one day training event repeated monthly.  Different people sign up for different dates so this event has only one participant status field (attended, cancelled etc)

3. Recurring Events - An ongoing event eg a regular toddler group/Sunday school group.  Set it up once and it can either run ad infinitum  (eg Sunday school every week of the year) or you can block out weeks when it doesn't run (eg no toddler group in the school holidays). 

Functionality will hopefully include the ability to:
•   Create events/courses that run for a number of weeks/months as above, with the flexibility to alter certain session times if need be eg skip a holiday Monday in the middle of a term.
•   Re-use previously created schedules
•   Assign people to these ongoing events at any stage
•   Generate registers (The future Civimobile project should make on-the-spot attendance recording possible on mobiles/tablets)
•   Create and assign people to smaller groupings within a weekly event eg breakout/tutor groups within a large course
•   Record attendance and report on this, by individual/event/small group and by week/month/year/course, with additional reports
•   Record notes about an attendee on a particular week/course
•   Give remote group leaders the ability to record attendance for their groups. Report on this, reflecting current group hierarchies in Civi.
•   Flag up and email people who haven’t attended for a certain number of weeks etc
•   Hierarchy recurring events so that attendance trends can be mapped for ‘all parenting courses’ as well as courses in different areas of a city for example.

Opinions please!  Thanks.
LindseyM

[SarahG (FountainTribe)]

This sounds like a great MIH. 

Some use-cases that need to be considered:
  - Have a single point of change for things that come up during the duration that the sessions are scheduled. For example: A 7pm weekly class may need to shift to 8pm after about 4 weeks.    An ongoing/perpetual event ( such as weekly religious services) may move from 9am to 10am.

  - In most cases, all sessions will meet at the same location/room, but there should be a way to override location for a certain week. For example, the weekly tot class is normally held in room ABC, but on week 6 its held in room DEF.

 - Need a way to integrate with a Drupal views powered calendar.  Currently any public CiviEvent is shown on the website's Drupal calendar. People may want to filter on classes/sessions just like they can already do by having an event type filter on the view.

- Need a way to modify a participation record after the start of the session. For example: There may be a 12 week program with choices of topics/sessions:  a) cooking  b) hockey c) yoga d) dance.    Someone may initially register for the program, choosing the cooking session.  After 3 weeks, they decide to switch to the yoga session (if there is still space) for the remaining 9 weeks. 

- When someone clicks on the website calendar for an event/session, it should be clear to the participant if they are registering for just one date, or if they are registering for a 12 week program.

- When someone is registering for a complex multi-part/recurring event, there may be different prices associated with different sessions.   If someone registers 6 weeks into the start of a 12 week program, there may be a need to prorate the price so that they only pay for 6 weeks, not the full 12 weeks.

- Need a way to have all relevant data available to the CiviCRM iCal feeds, so people can subscribe to the schedules.

[lee.gooding]

Has there been any progress on this? This is something that we are very interested in.

Thanks!

[Donald Lobo]

Dont think this project has got any seed funding. Seems like lots of folks are interested in using it, but very few (or no one) is interested in either committing money or developer resources to make it happen

lobo

[LindseyM]

Lee - if you might have some finance to help with this, please get in touch with me.  In the meantime http://drupal.org/project/civicrm_multiday_event  looks interesting.

Lindsey

[lee.gooding]

Thanks for the link. I will definitely check it out. As for funds...I wish .

[jgregory]

I would gladly contribute dollars to this. Please contact me if this is still being considered. - John

[LindseyM]

Hi John
Please email me on lindsey.mansfield@woodlandschurch.net for more info. It has been an exciting week in terms of this project as I did a lightning talk about it at Civicon and we are starting to see some seed funding come in... so it could well start coming together. I think the talk will be on the website from Wed onwards.

If you email me we can discuss it in more detail and I will give you my phone number too so we can chat about it. It'd be great to see this moving forward and there's definitely some traction at the moment.

Lindsey