Events - my vision of the future

I've been working for the past few months with CiviCRM and despite the differences which came as a bit of a culture-shock to me, I've cobbled together a few ideas for things that perhaps could be considered for future versions. Please bear in mind that these are simply things that I have had to add myself for a live contract and in no way reflects poorly on the CiviCRM system as it stands. On the contrary, I think the fundamental aspects of CiviCRM offer an easy way to add crm functionality to your site. I've added these features by several different methods such as using a custom version of the core code and adding a few dupal modules. Event Owners Simply put, the events need to have an owner/maintainer that can have information emailed to them or available on their dashboard to keep them appraised of how the event is progressing. Event Budgets My client uses heaps of different systems to organise an event. Not only are there tickets to consider but an event also needs various other financial information recording. For instance; speakers, food & drink, programmes. While the information is simply figure and no transaction is taking place on the site, you can then see income and expenses on one page and see if you are breaking even or better. Now my Budget pages break the events costs down and give me an overview of attendance, income, expenditure and balance, invoice numbers and suppliers. Once I have this data I can then give my client a breakdown of costs throughout the year. Free places based on membership Basically, what do you get as a perk for being a member? How about free entrance to events. Simple, or rather not quite. I've added a membership for organisations that cascades to individuals and on top of that, the admin gets to choose how many places they get. ACL based on membership Some events only need to be available to members but I had to add the cascading membership mentioned above. Delegate Badges and Event Register Simply put, some events need those lovely 'what do I look like?' badges and also a register to tick people off as they arrive. Then information which may be helpful on the night added to the register like dietary requirements. As with my last post. Please let me know what you think. There's a whole heap of things that can be added that would add more bloat than usefulness which is why I've stuck to the requests of my client and my solutions so far. EDIT: I'm having some trouble at the moment. If anyone can help with how I count the free places. I had a system that worked but I now have to change it. Any help will be gratefully received. Please see my form post: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,6519.0.html

Comments

These seem very useful. Are you planning on contributing any to the project? I'd love to be able to use some of them for my organization, but don't have the knowledge to implement them outside of the box.

The way the current project it growing is quite organic so after I am done I will hopefully be able to migrate from the myriad of dependant function into a nice easy to use module. Much of my work involves drupal so that is how it is coded but I hope that I can get it into the core. If anyone can help too I'd be grateful.

Hi,

When we are organising events, we do csv export to handle the delegate badges, registration list and all that jazz. However, bit cumbersome indeed. What's the format you're using ? Love to see this code ending up in the core.

As for the Budget, I see the need, but as the need of doing accounting in general. A CRM isn't and ERP, isn't an accounting software ;)

The reason for me needing to add some rudimentary finance info is just to give the client an idea of how their event is doing. Sage will be the finance package proper but that is normally the domain of the accountant bod. My client has reams of paper and spreadsheets with countless double handling and room for error. By giving them the ability to simply note their expenses in one place rather than 3 or 4. Note that when it comes to passing data to Sage, this finance data isn't sent, all I send is the event fees and membership contributions without card details.

I was looking at the CiviCRM web site and noticed this in the list of latest posts. As it happens, we're planning some CiviCRM / Drupal connection with Sage CRM software and possibly Sage Accpac. Thought I would just agree with you it's a very good idea, and if many of us are working on this in the future we can share notes.

Hi, Chris

Some of these enhancements sound really fantastic - especially the free places / acl based on membership aspects. Would you consider sharing the work you did? Especially any custom drupal modules you prepared?

Here's hoping you still monitor this,

Robin