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I work with several non-profits that work with underpriviliged children. Many of them do some sort of sponsor/mentor program where people can sponsor a child, a home, a school, or some other person/place that needs funding on an ongoing basis. Basically, it typically works by the sponsor sending in a set monthly amount and then receiving updates specific to the child/building/etc that they are sponsoring.

Right now pretty much all of these orgs do this by keeping large Excel spreadsheets and doing a lot of manual labor. It would be great if I could find a component that would allow them to track sponsors/mentors through the system. Things they would need to track would include (but wouldn't be limited to):

• Sponsor name
• Sponsor address
• Sponsor email
• Who/what sponsor is sponsoring
• Monthly sponsorship dollar amount
• Date and amount of last sponsorship payment

In addition, the system should allow communications to be sent via email to the sponsors regarding the child/place/etc that is being sponsored and should probably allow a way to house content online that can only be viewed by a group of sponsors specific to the content (ex: 5 sponsors sponsor one child, so all 5 would be able to view pictures, letters, etc. online that are specific to that child).

Is there anything out there right now that is at all similar to this?

jowens wrote:I work with several non-profits that work with underpriviliged children. Many of them do some sort of sponsor/mentor program where people can sponsor a child, a home, a school, or some other person/place that needs funding on an ongoing basis. Basically, it typically works by the sponsor sending in a set monthly amount and then receiving updates specific to the child/building/etc that they are sponsoring.

Right now pretty much all of these orgs do this by keeping large Excel spreadsheets and doing a lot of manual labor. It would be great if I could find a component that would allow them to track sponsors/mentors through the system. Things they would need to track would include (but wouldn't be limited to):

CiviCRM v1.6 (http://civicrm.org) would cover 70% of the functionality you need out of the box. If you need a solution tailored exactly to your needs, you will need to add some custom code specific to your needs.

jowens wrote:

• Sponsor name
• Sponsor address
• Sponsor email

Sponsors can be created as Contacts and put in a "Sponsor group" (you could also tag them as Sponsor)

jowens wrote:

• Who/what sponsor is sponsoring

Children who are being sponsored can also be created as contacts and be put in a "Children" group. The link between Sponsor and Child can be handled as a relationship. (thus allowing a sponsor to support multple children and a child to have multiple sponsors)

jowens wrote:

• Monthly sponsorship dollar amount
• Date and amount of last sponsorship payment

This can be handled by CiviContribute and a Contribute record could be created for each monthly contribution. If its online, this could be setup as a recurring automated contribution

jowens wrote:In addition, the system should allow communications to be sent via email to the sponsors regarding the child/place/etc that is being sponsored and should probably allow a way to house content online that can only be viewed by a group of sponsors specific to the content (ex: 5 sponsors sponsor one child, so all 5 would be able to view pictures, letters, etc. online that are specific to that child).

In Drupal, you would do this using organic groups. Not sure if there is a joomla equivalent or organic groups. You could potentially write some custom code to do this also

lobo

Lobo - Thanks for the advice! I had taken a brief look at CiviCRM and was a bit overwhelmed at the configuration options. I appreciate your tips on how I could set it up to make this work. I'll try and dig into it and see if I can figure it out, and then hopefully let you know how it went.

cool

no hassle. please post any follow up question on the civicrm forums. i think its a pretty good match between your desires and its features

lobo