Thread

I’m considering using Expression Engine as the tool with which to run The Riverside Choral Society in NYC. 

Below is my list of functional requirements for our groups IT needs.  The more I can deliver in one, integrated package, the better.  The more I can provide these through EE, or at least integrated with EE, the better. 

I could use some help in better understanding how well EE functionality covers these requirements.

1.  Requirements
  a.  CRM (contact relationship management)
  b.  Email campaign management
  c.  Online newsletters
  d.  Alumni relationship management
  e.  Donations
  f.  Ticket sales
  g.  Dues collection, record keeping, mgt
  h.  Rehearsal schedule postings
  i.  Rehearsal attendance recording
  j.  Rehearsal materials sharing
  k.  Music Markings reporting
  l.  Practice assignments
  m.  Project mgt, retain institutional memory
  n.  Member Center, profiles, communications, buddies, interest groups
  o.  Accounting tools
  p.  Mng riversidechoral.org Public Website
  q.  calendar

Putting these requirements into a narrative:

PUBLIC SITE:

HOME PG:  On the public side of the site, we want to have user friendly content publishing, so that a small group of designated persons can publish information about upcoming concerts, including: text, photos, music files, links. 

DONATIONS and TICKET SALES:  We want visitors to be able to make donations and buy tickets online, and that data to be captured and added to a CRM system.  If possible, we’d like to enable donors/purchasers to designate which choir member is associated with the sale. 

ABOUT: a page providing background text and photo gallery of the organizations history. 

NEWS:  We want a news and current events blog

PAST CONCERTS, REVIEWS:  After a concert is over, we want to easily move all the promotion information, plus the concert program, plus information about reviews to a retrospective/archival page. 

PRIVATE SITE:

MEMBERS CENTER:  Member profiles, messaging, interest groups, discussion boards
ATTENDANCE TRACKING TOOL: where section leaders can report on attendance, so that members can see when they’ve attended, missed.
DUES:  Ability for members to pay dues online.  Tool for management to track non/payment.
TICKET SALES:  Tool for measuring and/or reporting how many tickets each member has sold.
CALENDAR:  For showing schedule of events: rehearsals, ticket sale deadlines, dues deadlines, concerts. 
REHEARSAL AGENDA:  An agenda for each rehearsal
PRACTICE ASSIGNMENTS:  What practice assignments have been given by the director
PRACTICE MATERIALS:  pronunciation guides, MP3s to listen to, other document and media files and links
ACCOUNTING TOOLS: if we can somehow do budgeting and accounting in an EE module, great.  What other tools can we integrate/connect to EE?  Quickbooks?
EMAIL CAMPAIGNS:  Is there a way to use EE to help manage email campaigns?
CRM:  Would be nice.  Clearly some of your tools seem to imply rudimentary CRM.  But, is more robust functionality available?
PROJECT MANGEMENT:  We want our various committees (marketing, finance, benefit, etc) to have collaborative work space with project management tools.  I see two interesting threads on your site about Project Management.  Ideally we’d like to provide this functionality within EE or perhaps integrated EE.  But, if not, what might play nicely with EE. Our projects are not complex webdev, but: our marketing and promotion campaigns, ticket sales, producing concerts at Lincoln Center, benefit fund-raisers, etc. Our members are not necessarily tech savvy, although all college educated. 

If you could provide a good list of modules, and as much guidance as you can, that’d be great.  We are of course not-profit, and doing this all on the donated dev services of one overtasked bass/Wall Street programmer who’s learning EE just to help our group, because we can’t really afford to hire developers.  Which is why, of course, we’re talking to you: if he had to use Drupal, EZ Publish, etc., while the functionality modules might exist, or the integration with CiviCRM or SalesForce, the integration work would probably take 4 times as long, and be cost prohibitive.  If we can accomplish much of this vision on with just these resources, and cobble together as much functionality as we can, we’ll wow the group enough to muster more budget—and sell more tickets and raise the money—for a stage B and C development project.

If there’s no project management module for EE, or way to provide that function, then which free Project Mgt services might you suggest?  Same with Email campaign management, and CRM, although that gets harder do on a non-integrated basis. 

Thanks so much.

Adam Rosenberg

Hi, Adam!

You have quite a few needs here; and ExpressionEngine is not going to be able to fulfill every single one - I don’t think any one, or even two packages can fit all of your needs at once unless custom built for your project from the ground up.

That said, ExpressionEngine can certainly help you with a great deal of your project.  I’m going to generalize to apply this to many of your questions.  Let’s say you have some data to store - it could be a rehearsal agenda in this case.  You would make a weblog to hold those agendas, and each entry would be an agenda. You can set up custom fields to make it relevant to that type of data - for instance: location, time, items to bring, etc.

That same thing can be done for calenders, attendance, etc.

You can find a list of modules on our Pricing Page.

There is a mailing list module; depending on how robust you need this, there are options to integrate something like Constant Contact with ExpressionEngine.  This really depends on if you need items such as campaign statistics - or if you just need to send off a few hundred emails.

There is not a Project Management module; and ExpressionEngine is really not intended to be Project Management software.  You can set up a weblog to track projects, as generalized above, with comments about who is doing what, and you could use relationships to make it even more detailed - but ultimately, you might be better off to go with a system that is built, from the ground up, as Project Management software. 

The same goes with accounting; ExpressionEngine definitely is not accounting software.

Now, we do have a Development API that you could use to tie your needs with other applications.  Here are those development docs.

Ultimately, I would recommend sitting down the 30-day hosted demo and perhaps some of the tutorials from train-ee.com and eescreencasts.com.  Work with ExpressionEngine for a bit and you’ll quickly see how it works and where it can work for you.  You can find the trial information on our demo page.

I realize I did not get too much into specifics here but you have quite a far-ranging set of needs, so I’ve done my best to cover the overall idea of what you want without getting into too many technical details.  Do post back if you have any other questions!

Thanks so much for responding at what appears to be a useful level of specificity to my gangling, semi-informed query.