Social Services: Many to many relationship?

[shinab]

I am wondering if SugarCRM can be customized for use within a social services organization. Sugar seems geared primarily for sales and support where many clients are assigned to one employee or team of employees. In human services, clients may be enrolled in programs from a number of different providers - a many to many relationship.

How difficult would customization be, if at all possible? Has a SugarCRM installation ever been modified for this sector?

My other Open Source candidate is CiviCRM which is geared for non-profits and toward fund raising and political action campaigns. Its client model has contacts, family members, donors, workers, and volunteers. Something similar to Lagan Human Services would be ideal but the project doesn't have much of a budget.

The specific use would be for low-income tribal members applying for and receiving aid from a number of tribal and non-tribal public services departments and agencies. The tribal departments would like to share basic client information, and universally display what services clients are currently receiving. Each department would also need their own confidential data associated with the client (eligibility information) that only their employees could view, approve, and update.

They wish to have a tracking system (cases?) to make free form notes on actions (meetings, phone calls, emails, etc.). They also need to make referrals to other departments or agencies. These referrals should then be assigned a default follow up task for the employee that referred the client. e.g. upon referral to Health Clinic, call clinic's contact in two weeks to see if client made appointment or had an examination. Shared calendaring and appointments are also on the wish list (scheduling by assistant, auto time finder, resource reservations, etc.). A family member table like CiviCRM would also be beneficial.

The system would be for use by about five small departments (8-10 employees) on an intranet that has no in-house tech support, domain or directory servers. An external provider hosts the tribe's static web site and email server.

Possible future expansion of the would allow interaction with outside agencies and automated eligibility criteria processing.

If the customization process changes the labels of fields, tabs or modules to more directly relate to social services jargon for end user ease-of-use, what impact could that have on Sugar University training that is geared toward a sales operation?

[kenlyle]

You might try CiviCRM.org

I do know that they have the notion of a Household, which is something you would also likely find helpful. They also have a donations module. Overall, that product's target market seems to much better fit your demographic than Sugar.

Best of Luck,
Ken

[Scott_Savage]

It should not be too hard to modify the system in this way. We are a recruiter, so we have lots of many-to-many relationships between clients/job orders/candidates.