Develop a civicrm-based student database

This is a contract to create a civicrm based student database. The project involves creating a new civicrm database, modifying it so that it has all of the capabilities of a previous Access-based database, and writing code to load the old Access information into civicrm. Support including answering questions and bug fixes is required for a period of 6 months. ## Deliverables The organization I work for is a non-profit seminar company. We used to collect student information and class registrations in a custom-built MS Access database. We would like to move this data into a civicrm database. The information we collect includes mainly two types of information: information on a student (including custom fields) and information on the set of classes a student has taken. We need to do basic processes with this information such as sending e-mails to groups of students, creating mailing labels, class lists, and so on. We are looking for someone to do the following for us: - Install drupal and civicrm in an account we will give you - Modify civicrm so that it can do what we need (see below) - Write some code to help us import our Access-based data into civicrm - Assist us while we import our data (for privacy reasons we cannot provide the data to you) - Be available during a testing period to make changes / modifications - Provide support, including questions & answers and possible fixes, for a period of 6 months to 1 year We are looking to select a vendor who we will establish an ongoing relationship with. We are looking for someone who can help us understand civicrm, maybe show us features that we didn't know about, and generally help us make this transition an orderly one for us - in addition to building the database of course! We are looking for someone who we can feel comfortable working with via e-mail and telephone. We have plans for future versions of this database and will work with this vendor on the future versions as well. We will provide a copy of the Access database to the selected vendor. In the meantime, in the description below and in the attachments you can read about what our current database does for us. These are the things our current database can do: - Create/Update/Delete people records with specialized fields - Ability to search for or jump to a particular user's record - Create mailing labels which we print out on letter paper - Create/Update/Delete a list of classes. Classes have a class name, date, and location. - Register students for a class - Send e-mail to a group based on properties in the student record, e.g. the student's location, classes they have taken or a combination thereof - Export records to Excel - Import records from Excel - Create a printable report of a group of students based on properties in the student record, e.g. location, classes they have taken or a combination thereof. In the attached screenshot, you can see the fields we track for a student. The fields under "Personal Information" and "Options" and "Memo" are properties of the student. The fields under "Classes" are a list of the classes that the student has taken and the dates (if available) that they took the class. In the Access database, the fields under "Classes" are properties of the student. My vision is that the fields under "classes" would actually be imported as class registrations. This would require massaging the student data a little to pull out the list of class registrations already recorded on the students, compiling a list of the classes, creating those classes in civicrm, and then creating registrations for the students against those classes. My thought is this is how we will handle class registrations in the future in civicrm (register a student to a class rather than note the class on the student's record) so that although this is more work up front it lines us up for the future. We are definitely looking for input from our selected vendor on this. We are also looking for advice from our selected vendor on suggestions for a drupal theme that makes civicrm / drupal easier to navigate and administer. The default theme shown on [login to view URL] with some menu options on the left and some on the right is challenging. This may not be possible but is desirable. Overall, we have about two weeks to build this new civicrm based database and data import routines. Once the database is built, an intense test period will take about 1 month, then the database will be wiped clean, a fresh data import will occur, and we will be live in production.