Our church has an active ministry to deliver meals to ill people, and to provide rides. Currently, it is all manual, that is, the coordinator contacts people by phone or email, and logs their responses on paper. It's manually intensive. the coordinator was talking with a relative who said that her church used a wiki to manage this. She called me, the webmaster, to see what I could do to support this need using the web site.
The requirements are:
Provide a signup capability for meals for a person or family for a period of time, with meals delivered on a regular frequency for a period of time, or for rides to the doctor or whatever as requested.
Include contact information, driving directions.
Of course, make it easy to coordinate, to signup, to monitor who is signed up when, and where the open signups are.
I had two suggestions based on things we do currently. One is a page that is editable by a set of people with a role, which is used for managing our audio support for services. It works well for this team of 4 who are all able to deal with editing a web page using, in this case, FCKeditor.
The second suggestion was to use the Signups module, which we have used for people signing up for meals for the youth meetings, and for things like a painting event (painting the kitchen or part of the ministry center, for example). When I described Signups to the coordinator, she was a little concerned because every signup requires the creation of a node, and for something where people are signing up for meals daily for several weeks, that is a lot of node creation. I used views in another site for showing all signups, open signups, and closed signups. This case would probably require more refined views that would show signups for a particular need as well as all of them.
I found two modules that might help: Node Repeat supports the creation of a set of nodes. Signup Multiple supports the signup for multiple nodes that are created with Node Repeat.
This still feels a little difficult to make work, especially for this coordinator who is, shall we say, technically challanged.
Have you tried to implement a signup system on your web site to support a ministry like this? What modules and/or approach did you use?
Comments
Yeah, this does sound a bit
Yeah, this does sound a bit complicated. I just built a scheduling system for my church to help schedule nursery workers and send out automated reminders.
I'd say to do this well, you'd have to use CCK to build a custom content type. That way you could just create one node for each person/family you need to deliver to. You could then include a gmap, etc for all of the needed info along with date fields for the days meals are needed.
Then, you could use user-reference fields to allow people to sign up (they still have to be able to edit the node) or allow the coordinator to plug them in.
If would be nice if there were some edit-in-place module you could incorporate so that average non-technical users could sign up without having to edit the whole node.
Then you could use views to make some custom views of who does what and when...even look at places which need filling in.
Sorry that isn't an easy fix...but it can be done with Drupal. Cheers!
http://www.michaeldhart.com
Aw, jeez. I'm not a shill, honest
I ran into this site called CareCalendar on Ship of Fools. I bookmarked it, because it looked pretty useful, and something that would take a buttload of work to create in Drupal.
I promise I don't know anything about them, and I've only done a cursory look at the site, but it's purpose-built for coordinating care.
I don't know how good it is, but seems to have the right pieces and parts.
CareCalendar does look good
I've been asked about adding it to our site. It does many useful and necessary things, but I'm concerned about the fact that it would require setting up two communities — the Drupal-based community and then the CareCalendar community.
Maybe after D7 is out the door, the Lullabots will show us how to do it with Drupal (hint, hint).