hey folks,

The Progressive Technology Project (PTP) has a pilot project running using Powerbase, an enhanced version of CiviCRM for base-building community organizing groups. I am responsible for two of the four sites, a community group in Oakland and one in San Diego. I did a site visit last week and wanted to share some of the feedback I received with the community here. As PTP further develops this database project, we hope to keep contributing to CiviCRM and we thought sharing what comes up could be one way for us to do that.

I will start with the one thing both groups want. Actually we have a third group in NYC that also has expressed this need: an interface that allows them to call members and enter their responses for a particular event on the same screen (something like a batch update profile where they can view phone numbers AND custom fields). Organizers have found that if they touch a member 3 times before an event or meeting that the likelihood that that member attend said event goes up dramatically. Therefore they want to track those touches and responses.

Right now we have an event that has participants. We created some custom fields for participants - date of and responses to1st, 2nd, 3rd call (to track the touches) - in addition to childcare needed and Ride To and Back. We then created a profile and updated the participants' info, but could not pull up the phone number of those participants on the same form.

Tracking touches is a key activity for the groups we work with. If people have ideas on how to more effectively do this within CiviCRM, please share.

The San Diego group had lots of usability requests. They were interested in having more mechanisms in place to minimize data entry errors. Suggestions include:

• making appropriate fields automatically become Title Case (first name, last name, etc),
• having data collected in separate input boxes in order to use drop downs (area code is one example, parsing address so that St or Way or Ave could be selected is another).

In line with the above, they had suggestions for making profile update forms work better:

• a popup calendar for entering dates,
• a button for entering today's date,
• a button for blanking the date,
• a mechanism for auto- marking attendance NO (Participant Status is "No-show") if any of the touches is NO,
• can we freeze the first columns of names if we have to scroll to the right to see the rest of the columns.

Questions that came up in Oakland:

• how do i search for a person with no groups?
• they created a custom field for members who only want to be contacted once a year. anyone have thoughts on how that could be implemented efficiently?

These are some of the things our groups are dealing with. We are particularly interested in tracking the touches. Some of these individual questions we will pose in the forums but we wanted to give folks a sense of the work PTP is doing with basebuilding groups.

Josue Guillen
Powerbase Coordinator
Progressive Technology Project