On Fri, 31 Oct 2008, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote: > Dave Rolsky wrote at 11:45 (EDT) on Thursday: > >> Another thing that might help is that I have a notion of an "account". >> This is an account as in "the people who are paying for the service", >> and an account will have 1+ users. So The Software Freedom Conservancy >> would be an account, and Brad Kuhn would be a user under said account. > > That makes sense. There is also the concept of "Directed Donations" > which are heavily linked to this. The idea is that a donation can come > in earmarked for a certain task. Nearly all non-profits do this at some > point, but the umbrella-style fiscal sponsors like Conservancy get > *most* of their donations that way.
As far as directed donations, as I said, each donation can have a "donation target". By default, each account has one target, "General Fund", but you can add more. Maybe I should just call this a "fund" instead (I did at one point). >> I imagine that if an account could in turn have "sub-accounts", that >> might satisfy many of the needs an umbrella org has. Users in the >> master account could browse contacts & donations for all sub-accounts, >> and could do reporting on one, some, or all sub-accounts together. > > Yes, that makes sense, I think. There might be some subtle gotchas. > > The general idea is that a user, who might be a donor, can also be in > charge of a restricted set of Directed Donations. The account idea you > are talking about will probably work. In Rapport, users _are_ contacts (just like CiviCRM), so a user can be a donor, yes. I'm not sure how "in charge" of donations would work. Since I'm not planning on building an accounting system, this seems out of scope. Rapport would have no concept of who is in charge of some money, it can just tell you that you got donations from some contacts towards some fund. >> But right now I'm just kind of guessing what an umbrella org might >> need. I've never been involved in running one myself. > > Would drawing up a workflow diagram help? I have always been bad at > analysis phase of software development, and have done it wrong in my > previous attempts. So, I'm open to feeding you whatever knowledge you > need, but probably bad at guessing what you need. It would probably help. The real problem is I just don't understand how an umbrella org operates, whereas I understand a small nonprofit like my animal rights group quite intimately, as I'm a board member, the treasurer, and part of the fundraising committee. -dave /*============================================================ http://VegGuide.org http://blog.urth.org Your guide to all that's veg House Absolute(ly Pointless) ============================================================*/ _______________________________________________ software mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.flossfoundations.org/mailman/listinfo/foundations-software
