CiviCRM and Chapter Organizations

[DamonKirkpatrick]

Hi all - I work for a non-profit that is made up of a central corporation and several chapters.  The corporation manages all the membership fees, member information, renewals, etc.  The chapters manage their activities in their local area.

I can't quite figure out if CiviCRM will do what I need.  I need to be able to load all our contact information centrally, track whether memberships are expired and the level of membership, and then make that information available to each chapter.

So, for example, if I'm president of the New York City chapter, I need to be able to log into the website and get information about, send emails to, download spreadsheets containing, address snailmail newsletters to only those members associated with my local chapter.

On the same note (and I'm assuming this part would come from the CRM side) I need to be able to download files and see news updates related to larger, umbrella organization.

Also - the web-hosting service we're looking at has Joomla pre-installed.  Where can I find a list of the components that only work with Drupal vs. not working with Joomla?

Any thoughts???

Thanks.

[Dave Greenberg]

You should be able to use CiviCRM "Access Control List" (ACL) functionality to give you the tiered segmentation you've described. Your setup might work something like this:

* Create either separate Membership Types OR a custom field for Membershp to designate the Chapter
* Create a Smart Group (saved search) for each members of each Chapter
* Create ACL roles for Chapter xxx Staff (one role for each chapter)
* Create an ACL role for Corporate Admin
* Create ACL groups for each role and assign each staff members contact records to the appropriate group

You might want to experiment with this a bit on the public demo: http://demo.civicrm.org/drupal
... and read about ACL's and Smart Groups in our online doc: http://documentation.civicrm.org

As for Drupal / Joomla "add-ons" - probably a Google search is your best bet.

[DamonKirkpatrick]

Thanks, Dave.  That's exactly the information that I needed.

[vsharma012]

Thanks, Dave.  That's exactly the information that I needed.

Hi,
I tried creating smart group but i am not getting an option (a check box) to make it usable for Access Control. I see only Mailing option. Unless i create it for Access control i cannot assign it to a Role created for ACL.

Thanks

[petednz]

Smart Groups can be used as the 'target' for the ACL but not for the 'group that is doing the controlling' - hth

[vsharma012]

Smart Groups can be used as the 'target' for the ACL but not for the 'group that is doing the controlling' - hth

Hi,

Can you please elaborate it bit more please.

Vikas

[petednz]

I'll try. You said

I tried creating smart group but i am not getting an option (a check box) to make it usable for Access Control.

I am saying you won't find that checkbox because the checkbox is for saying 'this is the group that has limited access to see only the people in the target group' - and you can't use a Smart Group as the group that gets the access. You can only use a Smart Group for the group that they will have access to.

So there are two groups you create. one that gets the 'access' , the other the group that they get 'access to'.

The first can't be a Smart Group, the latter can.

HTH

[vsharma012]

I am saying you won't find that checkbox because the checkbox is for saying 'this is the group that has limited access to see only the people in the target group' - and you can't use a Smart Group as the group that gets the access. You can only use a Smart Group for the group that they will have access to.

So there are two groups you create. one that gets the 'access' , the other the group that they get 'access to'.

The first can't be a Smart Group, the latter can.

HTH

Thanks for the info provided it is clear now.

[petednz]

Can you explain a bit more? You won't get Access Control for Smart Groups. Unclear what you are describing

[vsharma012]

Hi,
Actually i want to achieve the following.

I have multiple organisations. All organisations have a subtype as org subtype. The org subtype has members and other subtype of individuals like vendors, staff etc.

I want one organisation's user, members or contacts should not see the data of other organisations, members users etc. This can be achieve by using the groups but the nin that case i need to create one group for each organisation and it may not be possible to hide the group from users.

I thought of doing it using smart group by saying select .... where organisation = user/member's organisation

Any idea of doing it. Thanks again for the info provided above.

Vikas

[jday]

also trying to achieve the same thing, let one chapter handle it's own contacts and restricting access to all other chapter contacts. So Chapter one admin can see and edit chapter 1 contact but can't access or see chapter 2 contacts.

[Dave Greenberg]

I think the steps I listed in my post above still apply. The main hitch is you'll need 2 groups for each chapter - so if you many chapters it gets cumbersome. The other option is to implement an ACL hook which defines the rules based on (for example) a custom field which designates "Chapter X Admin" for the admins. This will require some PHP and SQL knowledge.

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC32/CiviCRM+hook+specification

[xavier]

Hi,

Is the ACL creation already part of the OG module ?

ie. when creating an OG, it creates two groups (Admin and members), and the rule saying that admin can see/edit the contacts in the member group.
X+

[petednz]

Correct - the easiest way of creating ACLs 

[AudreyKate]

I have a question on this subject that relates to scalability.

I'm setting up ACLs just as described here for our organization's 15 chapters -- two groups for each: Chapter X Members (Smart Group) and Chapter X Staff (Regular Group, used for Access Control). Each individual contact in the staff groups will have access to only one smart group.

In the documentation, it says "Setting up access control on multiple Smart Groups may result in fatal errors due to exceeding the maximum allowable number of JOIN statements in MySQL." Is this only an issue when you give an individual contact access to multiple smart groups, or is there also a problem when setting up access to multiple smart groups by different individuals, as I'm seeking to do?