(from a post to crm-dev)

A political party I work for tracks involvement as follows:

Member: status 1 new, 2 current, 3 lapsed (haven't paid this year), 4 old lapsed (haven't paid this year or last year), 5 haven't paid for more than 2 years. Membership is by calendar year. Memberships paid Oct 1 - Dec 31 cover period til end of following year. Lapsed members have full membership privileges until March 31 of first unpaid year.

For the current event, there are up to 6 marks representing voting intention in different canvasses/phonebanking.

Mark
EnglishDescription
FrenchDescription
SortOrder

For each event (see below), there is a Roles record:

EventID
RolesID
MarkCode (used to record final voting intention for historical events)
Sign Y/N
SignType
Worker Y/N
WorkType	
EDayWorkType
(these worktype fields only show primary volunteer activity - they should be normalized into a different table to handle multiple kinds of volunteering by the same person)
Donation (this shows total donations during the event period, and should be normalized to handle multiple transactions)
Donor Y/N
Voted (voted in advance poll)
Notes
PhoneBankCode	(code including latest phonebank results - should be normalized into a different table)

ID
Year
Month
Level
Type
Jurisdiction
Notes

By-election
Convention
Election
Fund-raiser
Leadership Race
Miscellaneous
Nomination Meeting
Outreach
Party Event
Referendum

Federal
Municipal
Other
Provincial

Also, up to 9 Issue codes: used to track policy interests, mailbacks to pieces, etc.

Code
Description
Department

Ethnicity, Occupation, and MailingLanguage are other useful fields for targetting.

Language
EnglishDescription
FrenchDescription

We are looking to correlate census information using postal code for geo-referencing to improve our targetting. I am interested in helping out with that.

On the donations front, Canadians are generally required to issue receipts for monetary donations to political parties and candidates, and also for in-kind donations similar to services someone provides in their line of work (eg advertising, accounting, software development). I can't remember the general rules for accepting and receipting in-kind donations of goods. These requirements vary by jurisdiction, and so I would recommend that CivicCRM be able to handle donations to various levels of the organization. There should also be alerts that prevent (or at least flag for exceptional treatment, like accepting up the remaining allow amount) donations that would go over the maximum allowed.