I've been working with a couple of Newton Public Schools to help their PTOs take their directories online. These directories contain contact information for each household, including home address/email/phone, parent info and student info.
I think where we're headed is to use CiviCRM to manage all this, since it has the contact management and the relationship management features built in. But it's taking some effort to get this configured. Has anyone done this before? Any advice?
I'm also trying to come up with a simpler, short-term solution that may not be as robust, but that allows parents to enter and validate their information. I set up a Google Docs spreadsheet and front-end form which allows them to enter the data. But they it goes into a black box, which can't see. There's no way in Google Docs to show them their data again and ask them to validate it. Are there any solutions that support this without requiring each updater to login with a user account (e.g., by having a randomized URL link instead)?
Thanks for any feedback.
Comments
CiviCRM does do this
It does do what you want. I remember we were using it for our website for Drupal 4.7 and at one point my colleague decided to upgrade CiviCRM, which turned into a 10 hour marathon manual database upgrading session. Fun. CiviCRM is kind of like hitting hit a nail with a cement truck though, it includes a lot of overhead you may not use.
Why can't you create a CCK form with a Captcha at the bottom to prevent the bots? Then the information would be stored in your own database and you could fix it later? You could even set up it up so that the parent is emailed the information as confirmation of them entering it, and of course they would see the information as soon as it was entered.
As for logging in, is there a reason why you don't want the parents to have a user account with the school? Creating a user role for parents with limited access privileges might solve a lot of headaches later (and you might be able to use those accounts more for other things, like SimpleNews to email the parents with school newsletters, etc...)
Dave
Agreed
CiviCRM is a beast. I've recently installed it on D5 for a public school bond campaign. It helps campaign volunteers email each other without having to know everyone's emails. Also allows people to sign up for a campaign newsletter sent out using CiviMail as well. It's nice because you can track who has opened them, etc. (assuming they get the HTML version).
Check this howto ..
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Creating+a+website+mem...
Should not be too hard to do with the standard setup. Ping us on IRC if u need help