Since CRM stands for Constituent Relationship Management, one would expect to have robust capabilies for dealing with relationships. This expectation is met when using the staff areas of CiviCRM.

However, in any of the self-service areas such as event registration profiles, membership profiles, and stand-alone profiles then relationships are missing.  Each profile can only be used to collect information about a single contact.

This lack of support for relationships causes headaches in the following situations:

Eli Beckerman is the second winner of a copy of Using CiviCRM from Packt Publishing. Eli is excited about the potential of CiviCRM to organize bottom-up transformations to deal collaboratively with the many crises facing the world today.

Packt has also selected a runner-up in its contest: an experienced CiviCRM user from the City Bible Forum, ken, will get a downloadable eBook copy of the book.

Here's some background on Using CiviCRM from Packt's site:

What you will learn from this book:

A few months ago as our organization was just starting to use CiviCRM, Dave Greenberg recommended that we look at CiviCase as a solution for our admissions team to keep track of prospective students. As a collection of activities associated with a client, CiviCase looked like a great way to record our interactions with potential students as we made initial contact, followed up, received communication from them, sent more info, and then accepted their applications. From a DB point of view, yes, it is a nearly perfect way to store that information. But from a UI point of view, we had a long way to go before our admissions team would be able to painlessly get the data in, work with and update it once it was there, and then be able to get it back out in the form of reports. Here's what we did to make that happen (and more!):

A school needed an online admission application process to be developed and integrated with CiviSchool. The application form is a different workflow from the online family forms. Web Access helped convert this idea to working application as part of the CiviSchool Project. I have been working with Web Access on this project and we have completed most of it. Now seemed to be a good time to let everyone know about what we have done so far. Here is how the admission workflow is -

• Parent account setup :
  A parent goes to the school site and uses a civicrm registration profile to create an account and enters the site. The account automatically gets assigned a "Applicant Parent" subtype.
• Filling admission application forms :
  From the dashboard parent fills admission application forms for an applicant (child). Parent can apply for 1 or more applicants. All applicants are assigned a "Applicant" subtype.
• Submitting a payment :
  Depending on whether financial aid is taken or not, parent submits a payment for an applicant. The payment is done via contribution page with contribution type - "Application Fee". Since parent is the one making the payment, to keep track of which applicant the payment is being done for, an extra argument is passed to the payment/contribution url. We using a hook to make all the checks and link the payment to the applicant.
• Scheduling appointments :
  Once the application is complete and payment is made (if needed), parent can schedule a child visit or a parent interview. A school tour could be booked at any stage of the process.

We've been hard at work implementing an online set of forms to collect family information for the school module. This is one of our final projects for the year and eliminates the tedious summer ritual for the admin staff of sending paper forms to the 200 school families and for the parent to fill out the same information every year. This also saves the admin staff from entering that same information into the SIS

We've built this work on the parent portal that we launched late last year. Parents can update information on themselves and their children anytime via their drupal account. The form is composed of 5 sub-forms:

• Household Information: Name, Email, Phone and Address of the household. We currently support 2 household and 4 contacts. These are stored as CiviCRM contacts with a relationship link of type Parent / Child to the student. We created a custom group to store which household a parent belonged to. We did not use CiviCRM's household functionality.
  

The next phase of the CiviSchool project is collecting and maintaining all parent / student information online. This avoids the annual filling out forms work by the parents, and also the stuffing of envelopes by school staff during the summer and reentering all the information in the SIS when school starts.

To make things easier, we wanted to export and import as much data as possible from PowerSchool. It has a pretty good export and we got all the information in a nice familiar CSV format. However the system is not very "relational". Parents and addresses have multiple records (one for each student), hence there is some amount of inconsistency in the system with regard to names and addresses. Also we have the CiviCRM/Drupal based system in operation for a year and this has also resulted in slight divergence between the two systems.

We had a great day at DrupalCon SF 2010 today, especially in our BoF sessions :) To keep the momentum going, we are planning to have a few more BoF sessions:

• Canvassing and GOTV (Get Out The Vote) functionality in CiviCRM. We'd like to extend the current CiviEngage module and incorporate the work done by Will B on Voter Canvassing. We'd also like to incorporate some of the ideas floating around with regard to CiviPetition and build campaign functionality in CiviCRM. This BoF will be scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, 3:00 pm. I'll update the blog post with room details soon.
• CiviSchool module for K-12. We've built and deployed a school module to manage a K-8 school interaction with staff / parents / students. We'd like to extend this module, deploy it in more schools and integrate it with open source and commercial SIS packages (Student Information Systems). We'd like to use this BoF to explore how more folks can be involved in this project. This BoF will be scheduled for Wednesday morning, 9:30 am.

Some of you'll are aware of the work i've done for The San Francisco School using Drupal 6.x / CiviCRM 2.2. You can read more technical details about this project on my blog.

Database

• Maintain name/email/phone/address information for people associated with the school (students, staff and parents)
• Maintain relationships between parents and their children
• Maintain relationships between a teacher / advisor and their students

Current Features deployed at SFS

• Give all parents and staff a login/password
• Online signups for all Parent Teacher Conferences
• Online signups for all extended care activity (classes after school)
• Sign-in / Sign-out for students attending extended care
• Computation of how many "activity" blocks a student has spent on extended care
• Parent viewing of the various extended care activities their kids have attended in the past
• Online maps of "Where we Live" of the school families
• Online directories of the schools and grades.

This is a continuing series of blog posts on deploying CiviCRM at San Francisco School. In the previous blog posts we discussed how to expose relationship information in a profile and how to manage parent teacher conferences. There are also some slides explaining the module from a recent training seminar

Our latest project was automating the extended care (classes before and after school) system. The previous process was quite manual and labor intensive (and error prone). The attendance sheet was printed (via a CiviReport) from the students signed in. The students queued up and were signed into the extended care program. Some of the students had to be manually written in (if they were not signed up). At the end of the day, the parents would pick up the child and locate the childs name in the multiple sheets and sign them out. Typically 10-20% of parents would not sign their children out. The business office would then take this piece of paper and then calculate the "activity blocks" (based on time spent in extended care) and enter them in an excel spreadsheet. There were a few exceptions to the rule (children of staff, students who signed up for unlimited extended care and some activities are free)

I continue my work on deploying CiviCRM for my kids school. In previous blog posts i documented how to use hooks and custom templates to schedule parent teacher conferences and extended care activities and how to expose relationship information in a profile view. In this blog post I'll describe some more advanced features. I'll also describe the code and directory structure.

New Code Structure and Directory Layout