I’m based with a group of three churches in Bristol, UK and we transitioned to Civi in June 2011, integrating it with our new Drupal 7 website. We’re loving Civi’s functionality and the customization it allows, but there is one thing on my wishlist which may be on yours too – the ability to deal easily with recurring events, including reporting on attendance.
Most of our events are recurring rather than one-offs - weekly clubs… and toddler groups… and courses… and the list goes on. Chatting to others at Civicon it seems that many others may like to see this as a core part of Civi so I’m blogging to gauge interest from the Civi community. Could this become a Make It Happen Project?
My organisation needs the ability in CiviEvent to:
- create events/courses that run for a number of weeks/months eg weekly events or a course that runs for 10 weeks, three times a year
- re-use previously created schedules
- assign people to these ongoing events at any stage
- create and assign people to smaller groupings within a weekly event eg our Friday youth club has numerous small groups within it
- record attendance and report on this, by individual/event/small group and by week/month/course. Reporting could include mapping trends over a number of months, flagging up and emailing people who haven’t attended for a certain number of weeks etc. Reporting could also flag up children whose age means they should move up to the next group.
- hierarchy recurring events so that attendance trends can be mapped for ‘all Sunday school groups’ as well as the five age group classes within that
- record notes about an attendee on a particular week/course
- give remote group leaders the ability to record attendance for their weekly groups. Report on this, reflecting current group hierarchies in Civi.
I also have more sophisticated wishes like automated check-in for weekly children’s groups, potentially producing parental collection cards and eliminating paper registers and subsequent data entry about attendance, but I’ll stop there for now!
In a forum post in 2009 about recurring event functionality lobo said, “I think there are lots of orgs who want it but very few (none?) willing to step up and either pay for it or develop it… Bottom line, someone needs to step up, coordinate and help push / buy / build this feature into the next version.”
I’d love to hear, via this blog, from anyone who’d be interested in seeing Recurring Events functionality developed. As well as being of benefit to many current Civi-users, these developments have the potential to draw in new users too as recurring events such as weekly gatherings and courses are the bedrock of many non-profit organisations. Do respond if you're interested or have further ideas about functionality as that will help the Civi core team to cost this as a project and we can then see if we can Make it Happen together. Lindsey Mansfield
Comments
I have always been amazed this function was not part of a package like CiviCRM.
Among other things, I am the Volunteer Coordinator for a cat shelter in Perth, Australia and currently use CiviCRM 3.4 with Drupal 6 to manage our volunteers and members. It does a tremendous job at this and I am expanding its use within the shelter. The main problem I have had though is managing the shifts of volunteers who regularly work on the shelter.
We have daily shifts for volunteer positions such as kennel hand, laundry and kitchen hand, and reception assistant that need to filled. Some volunteers regularly come in on a specific day every week, some fortnightly. Others can only come in on isolated days.
At the moment we use the now unsupported Drupal module Recurring Events to create all the shifts and this works in a fashion. But if we upgrade to CiviCRM 4 and Drupal 7 we will be in trouble.
One of the problems we have found with all these recurring events is you end up with so many. We control this to a certain degree with the use of event types but it would be good to call them something different than events. It seems to me CiviCRM was never designed to have lots of recurring events.
We certainly support the development of some way to handle recurring events, in all there forms.
Thanks Ian. That's a helpful perspective. We also have hundreds of volunteers serving each month in different teams at different services so the ability to somehow manage that via Civi would be extremely useful.
I think this in conjunction with the resource booking (see recent blog) would be really ideal for groups that run classes or sports.
For example the ability to book a court/ room / venue, & a teacher/ coach as part of a recurring event & have that also block out their calendar would be brilliant.
I work with the Wellington Circus Trust and they run blocks of classes. At the moment we just describe the recurring nature of the event in the text but the trust is about to sign a lease for it's own venue & being able to integrate these classes with room bookings would be a real bonus. (unfortunately I don't see WCT as a big financial contributor)
Great area for a Make it Happen initiative - keep pushing to make it happen.
At one point people were looking at allowing an event to contain other events. The hope was that this implementation strategy might be able to address two types of needs simultaneously.
The first would be allowing a 10 session course to be registered all at once, with each night's time and location set up independently, e.g. skipping a holiday Monday in the middle of a term, moving the location to somewhere different due a room booking problem, etc. So one higher level event - the course - would have 10 lower level events - the individual classes. Running the course again could be supported by copying the high level event and specifying a different start date.
The same general approach could also support breakout sessions at a conference, where different rooms would have different seating capacity and different sessions would thus have different maximum registrations. It might be nice, budget permitting, to put in some smarts about not registering for more than one concurrent session.
My initial sense is that it might be easier and more flexible to handle the issue of attendance reporting handling by tags or custom fields, rather than having to create hierarchies between courses.
HTH. Good luck!
I would absolutely LOVE to have a 'recurring events' option for CiviCRM Events! It is the one thing that most of my customers are asking for!!
Thanks for your input Joe, Chris and Nicolef. I'm still keen to see the way forward on this so it'd be great to hear from one of the Civi core team as to the best next step about potential Make It Happen possibilities and/or costings for a project of this nature.
Here are a couple of things that should be done next:
1. Find a list of folks who are "willing" to be the seed sponsors.
2. Decide what set of features is super-essential and should be part of the MIH. If the decision is ALL of the ones mentioned in the blog post, thats a fairly large project (100+ hours at the very least)
3. In general MIH's that have at least 33% seed funding when introduced are more likely to succeed. We prefer that all MIH's have a few seed sponsors before they are posted.
4. We hope to introduce a new set of MIH's for 4.2 in the next month or so. This would be a good addition
lobo
Thanks lobo.
- Please can you give me an indication of cost per hour so that I have an idea of the sort of overall costs were talking about.
- If a funded interest in this develops, is there a better way to continue the online conversation about specific features/potential costs with the Civi core team rather than publicly on the blog?!
- Is a two-stage MIH feasible, with basic functionality followed at a later date by more complex additions?
- What is the estimated date for a 4.2 release?
Lindsey
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Consulting+Services+Agreement
You can also use the wiki to spec things out and divide it into phases
I suspect 4.2 will be out in march/april. We are playing around with different models of the release cycle
lobo
Did you end up making this a Make it happen? I have a forthcoming client who require this functionality so will be actively developing some sort of solution…
Chris - I'm checking out costs with lobo so please can you contact me directly on lindsey.mansfield@woodlandschurch.net so that we can discuss the possibility of seed funding this project in the hope of Making It Happen!
And anyone else who's able to contribute in any way - I'd love to hear from you too. Many thanks.
Following discussions with lobo we've established that recurring events and attendance reporting (plus some of the other features mentioned by others in this blog) could be part of the 4.2 Civi release in March/April 2012... if we can fund it. The project has been costed at around £8,000 ($12,850). Here are the next steps:
1. We need to secure seed funding of one third of this cost (£2,640 or $4,250). My organisation will consider seed funding if I can get 2 or 3 other organisations to share the cost. As a seed funder you will help to shape this functionality so it's well worth getting involved at this level. More importantly, I need to secure seed funding BEFORE this can officially become a Make It Happen (MIH) Project which enables others to then part-fund it too.
2. Once we have seed funding others can then contribute as much/little as they can to fund this in full by mid-Jan. Lobo said that if we can secure all the funding within 2 months the developments will be part of the 4.2 release.
So... this functionality can really become part of Civi core. It's within sight, so please step up at this point to offer seed funding if possible or funding once it goes lives as a MIH. Seed funding asap is the key. I do believe that making recurring events and attendance easy to deal with (along with associated suggestions made by others) will not only make Civi more functional for many current users, but it will open Civi-use up to many other organisations which run courses, classes and so on.
Please get in touch. Either comment on this blog or email me directly on lindsey.mansfield@woodlandschurch.net Many thanks.
Lindsey
I have a similar situation too. Lots of events, volunteer shifts, classes, education programs, etc. Many of which offer a registration for the program, with classes then meeting each week or twice a week. Plus there is a need to track attendance for some but not all programs. ( Usually teacher does attendance, but some places do attendance on the honor system, in other cases the person is checking people in at the door.)
The current solution: Set up one main event called "2011 XYZ Program Registration" which includes the profile for online registration. Then set up a simple event ( no registraion) for the first session on Monday nights. Then use the unsupported Drupal module called "CiviRepeat" to create a series of events every Monday night, based on the initial Monday night event.
The downsides: There is no relationship between the event ""2011 XYZ Program Registration" and the events that occur each Monday night. There is also no relationship between any given Monday night event and any other Monday night event, even though logically they are all connected.
Setting up weekly shifts for standard tasks is very time-consuming. For example: Each Sunday and Wednesday there is a need for a room parent to bring in and organize snacks. Or at another time there is a need to have 8 2-hour slots selected by volunteers , depending on what time they want.
I've started a Wiki page on recurring events and attendance so do take a look and comment if you'd like to see this project driven forward.