Hello,
My organization has a wonderful website designed in Drupal by TakeNotice. We currently use Blackbaud NetSolutions for all of our membership sales, donations, and event registrations. However, we're finding NetSolutions is limiting, and it's not going to suit our needs for summer camp registrations.
With limited personal experience with Drupal, I'm wondering if anyone out there has advice on what the best solution is for more complex registration, including a shopping cart option, and other features that are more user-friendly. Is there a program that is affordable and works well for these purposes? A module for Drupal? What about custom registration pages designed specifically for our organization - is it too time-consuming and costly to consider?
Thanks for your help!
Comments
Have you looked into Web Forms?
That can come in handy for custom forms... Custom registrations is a tricky one though. We have had some experience in that area and it is not for the faint of heart unless a new module came out to link registration products to web forms (a solution that we once implemented for a youth sports org site in D5).
Good luck.
Cheers, Derek
https://coraltechgroup.com
civiCRM may be the best option
Hi Lynsey,
You may want to look into using CiviCRM with its CiviEvent module for class and camp registration and payment.
http://www.civicrm.org/
This would be a great topic to discuss at our next meeting, I'll plan on putting it on the agenda.
-Chris
that would indeed be a good topic
+1 on that!
https://coraltechgroup.com
civiCRM
Thanks for the input! We've looked into a few different options, from civiCRM to custom designed solutions to some of the more expensive systems that could eventually replace NetSolutions altogether. For as quickly as we'll need a solution, though, we may be best to start with something like civiCRM. Looking at the site, I don't see much information on the "shopping cart" option, which is the most important feature we'll need for summer camps. I'm seeing mention of a Drupal Ubercart module. Does anyone have experience with Ubercart, or using it with civiCRM?
civiCRM, Ubercart
When you say 'shopping cart,' do you mean functions to pay for the events themselves, or for purchasing other products and services? CiviCRM has event payment built in, but you would need to go with Ubercart for products and services. There is a module to help integrate CiviCRM with Ubercart (http://www.ubercart.org/contrib/3762), but it's not perfect - the customer addresses in Ubercart are still separate from those in the civiCRM database.
I work with both Ubercart and CiviCRM, though I haven't used the integration module yet.
Shopping Cart
What we're looking for specifically with the "shopping cart" is giving the users the option to register and pay for multiple camps on one page. With NetSolutions, users would have to register for one camp, enter their credit card information, then start the process over again for each additioanl camp. Most often, people want to register for multiple camps and we'd like to make it easy to select all the camps they want to register for and only have to enter their registrant and credit card information once. Can civiCRM handle this, or is this where the integration module with Ubercart could come into play?
We also tend to have waitlists for camps, and we're concerned about how Blackbaud's NetEvents handles full events (there is no waitlist options and users receive a cryptic error message that says, "Errors were encountered! Please make the appropriate corrections: the quantity specified exceeds the amount we have available." - not a very user-friendly way to say "this program is full"). So a way to track users who want to register for a full event, in the form of a waitlist, is another important priority.