CivicCRM and Eventfinder

Yes, CiviCRM integration was one of the early goals of EventFinder. The reasons for this feature not being included in this release are:

1) CiviCRM was only running on php5 and above, which is still a high bar for some organizations;

- and -

2) Most of the feedback I received on early versions of the module was that requiring registration was sufficient for people's needs. Multiple contact managers would have been redundant.

That said, CiviCRM integration has been and is a goal for a complete events system and I plan on doing this sooner than later. This project would go beyond just using CiviCRM as a contacts repository but also as a means of recording event registration and customer interaction.

What remains to be done is determine the level of integration between EventFinder and CiviCRM. I have been slowly putting together my thoughts here and see a number of opportunities for EventFinder enhancements:

1) Organizations in CiviCRM could be the hosts of events in EventFinder in addition to regular users.

2) Post event reporting - an interface could be made to collect information about participation in events outside the signup lists. For instance, people could record who showed up at each event, create a summary, report on the people who attend events most often, etc. Details would be kept in the contact history of individuals in CiviCRM and this information would be accessible the same way as other actions.

3) Event Contact Lists - groups created within CiviCRM that want to be notified about events based on the publisher / type of event / location of event / etc. This would almost be a substitute for saved searches in eventfinder, in that users are not specifying exact details about the events they want to be alerted about but, rather, event hosts are specifying the events they want to tell people about.

With contact lists, users could have lists of people to notify when events are published and maintain multiple lists.

4) Reporting Scorecard - A form of trending, tracks event attendance based on event type and the number of people who attend. Could be cross-referenced by the demograpics of event attendees, so you could look at the number of people aged 25-45 who attended fundraisers in the past 6 months and assess whether or not you are reaching a target demographic.

I would love to hear other people's ideas.

M

Interesting. I wasn't aware they were planning this. It may be interesting to get some of them in on planning for the next stages of the project.

I know the CiviCRM people plan on porting it to php4 at some point, they may already have done so.

M

Word up. I had a chance to get started with some investigation into integrating EF with CiviCRM last week. Right now, I am putting together a spec for how to do this the best way. What I would like to do is:

1) support user defined mailing lists (groups) which can be used for sending invitations to events.

2) support an extensible set of eventfinder actions. These actions would be the ones recorded in the crm history for contacts. They would essentially be triggered by users in EventFinder and fire off similar to hooks in other parts of drupal. For instance, when someone registers for an event, someone could write some custom code that notifies multiple people without rewriting EventFinder.

3) mapping interface - see http://www.trellon.com/eventfinder and search for some events. What's got me torn about this one is that I'm wondering whether people are really going to be able to support their own instances of mapserver. My company is working on a hosted solution where groups could access maps via an XMLRPC interface, but I know there are other groups working on the same thing and we are going to want a standard way to do all this.

M

jsaints - I have actually been working on MapServer integration for some while now, and am hesitant to want to switch gears midstream. I am wondering if you would be interested in collaborating to bring several mapping solutions out at the same time?

M