Is it possible to allow people to submit their own events to CiviCRM?

Question

I would like to create a website that collates events from several organisations.

The site should allow each organisation to submit their own events. However the submitter should not have full access to CiviCRM. In particular they shouldn't be able to see or modify events submitted by other organisations. (They don't necessarily need to be able to access or modify their own events, though it would be helpful if they could.)

The events need to go through a moderation process so that an administrator must approve each event before it goes live. Once the event is live it would be displayed publicly with events from other organisations. Visitors to the website would be able to view events from all organisations and book a place on any that they wish.

Is it possible to do this using CiviCRM? If so, how would you suggest that I go about this? Could webform be used for this?

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

I don't think Webform CiviCRM can create new events, but one option could be to get creative with the Drupal CiviCRM Entity module, where creating a new Event node would create the Civi event, allowing Drupal-based review queues, Views Bulk Operations for mass approvals, etc. I've noticed that 2.x-dev version of the module contains a patch that that allows you to do point-and-click for creating/editing/deleting CiviCRM records, but I haven't tried it personally so you may need to do some playing around with it.

Answer 2

I am not going to be able to discuss a full recipe here :-) But yes, I would think it is feasible and I would certainly use Webform for this. I could imagine a situation where you have one Drupal frontend feeding into more CiviCRM installs, where each organisation would have its own CiviCRM database? If the organisations do not need to share any contacts that might in fact be the easied solution? You keep track of the organizations in either Drupal or a CiviCRM install, with the settings that their CiviCRM installation requires? Interesting project!

Answer 3

William,

We implemented something very similar for United Methodist Communications (UMCOM) through Drupal and CiviCRM. Rethink events

We used the Drupal form builder module, exported the code and then built the form. Most of the time was spent gathering the requirements, specing, and testing. The dev process is fairly quick. UMCOM are expecting to have several thousand events running through CiviCRM by the fall with hundreds of Church admins creating events. We also created views so that these admins can generate a list of participants (with custom data)

Hope this helps