I'm taking care of the management of volunteers (about 800 people) for a 10-days music festival. I've been using drupal+civicrm for this for about 5 years now. There were some complaints that the way it works is not user friendly (but had to be implemented quickly). We've been looking to replace cicicrm by a commercial product but found out this product can't beat civicrm ;-)
So now I'm looking how I can improve the civicrm setup so everybody is happy! I hope to get some tips ...
I'll try to describe the way we are organised now and how I've set this up in civicrm.
At the festival there are about 50 different workplaces: bars, stage, backstage, toilets, foodstands, ... Each workplace has one or more responsibles. Volunteers can work on multiple workplaces. The workplace responsible must be able to manage the data of people working for him / her only. (So not of the other people) Currently this is setup using groups and giving access rights on groups. Disadvantage of this is that when a responsible adds a new volunteer but forgets to assign a group (or assigns the wrong group) he cannot acces the data anymore.
One of the most important parts is creating a planning of who will work in which place on a certain day and creating reports / lists. I've done this now using custom fields for the contacts and creating many reports using drupal views but this is a lot of manual work each year. I was wondering if using civievents would be more appropriate?
Ideally each volunteer would also be able to manage his/her own data (such as address, indicate when he/she's able to work, ...)
Any suggestions on the optimal way to implement this?