As requested a brief introduction - I am the Finance and Admin Team Leader for the RSPB Staff Association - a Trade Union for staff of the RSPB only.  We have over 1000 members and we are looking to move from our current systems of Excel Spreadsheets and Word and Outlook mail merges to a commercially available or open source Membership Management System.  Having looked to 17 systems we are very interested in CiviCRM.  I am hoping to get enough knowledge of CiviCRM from this course to determine if it meets our requirements.

I am the Librarian at the Scottish Poetry Library. I am also the member of staff responsible for IT. We are embarking on a range of digital change, and the installation of CiviCRM is part of this. We have a variety of audiences/stakeholders who are in contact with us for varying reasons. Listings of these are all on separate databases, spreadsheets, third party services, or don't even exist properly at all - we need a way to rationalise this and to be in a position to better communicate with all of these groups. Such as: borrowers (on our circulation system using Koha, also open source, we're keen to develop an automatic updating link between Civi and Koha...), Friends (supporters of the library, various categories, currently on Access), people who have registered for events/news updates, teachers, librarians, poets, admin - many different groups representing area of our outreach activity. We're a charity, supported by Creative Scotland, so interested in donations/campaign side of things too. We also want to be able to send regular newsletters out, 3 or 4 designed for different groups.

I'm interested in using Member, Contribute, Mail (although I'd like to understand how this might work if we continue to use Outlook for things too - ie how much we take our mail over to Civi). Not overly keen to use Events (although we do have an events programme).

We have basically decided to go ahead with Civi (although I guess the training could change that), with a Drupal base. Our website is also being redeveloped at the moment, using Drupal. We are not planning to too tightly link the two yet, but may host them together? Advice on hosting would be useful too.

I am a school teacher in Shropshire and I teach A level ICT. As a part of the students projects they have to create a web solution to given problem. In the past they have been given a free choice on the problem to be solved and a free choice on the solutions they implement. Due to issues with this (they spend more time finding an problem than solving it) we are looking at developing a set of 'not for profit' scenarios that they have to solve.

I am also a trustee of a small national charity and through this have a need for a membership management system. With current funding issues we looked at some of the commercial solutions but they proved to be too expensive for our budget – I then came across CiviCRM and have been working with a developer to get it to work for us. I now need to know how it works properly as we are about to go live with it.

I’d like an oversight of the whole system as we are hoping to use our installation to manage and automate memberships (our requirements for this were over and above the current Civi system, hence the developer), Events, Mail and reporting. By getting to know the system in this real situation I feel I will be able to guide students through better in the implementation of their A2 projects next year.

We are set up on Joomla for our website and I’d like to know how to implement the membership forms and renewals with the website as well as the events and a mailing list. Ideally I want to be able to set up a front-end admin for the everyday tasks for our administrator to be able to access member records and create mailings (as well as output details of memberships / events for snail mail).

Looking forward to meeting everyone - I won't be able to make the Wednesday evening meetup as my train doesn't get in until 9.00pm but would love to join you all for some food on the Thursday after the course.

I'll be working part time at the London Buddhist Centre for the next couple of years implementing a complete overhaul of our outdated and static lbc.org.uk site. I'm a programmer, previously client-side java for interactive art/learning/play, and am learning from scratch on the job to build and maintain web applications. Inspired by DharmaTech.org amongst others we are confident that Drupal + CiviCRM could meet the requirements of our organisation, which has a busy events program with several different types of constituents to communicate with as well as fundraising needs. The London Buddhist Centre is the largest of a network of many centres around the world. As such I'm particularly keen that we advocate free software so that we can eventually offer a free head-start to other similar organisations rather than each one starting the tricky job of event booking from scratch. 

Other than the usual raft of contacts, events, mailings and fundraising functionality some distinctive use cases that spring to mind follow. Listed in approximate order of preference most of them are not completely essential but might give a flavour of our ambitions for tailoring or extending CiviCRM if we're able

1. We currently use SagePay for online bookings and would much rather integrate SagePay into CiviCRM than migrate to another payment processor.
2. The first stage of our project is a micro-site for booking solitary retreats. These retreats may be any number of weeks long so it's not obvious how to use events to make this possible without multiple transactions for each week. So, the ability to do multiple bookings in one transaction, or some pragmatic but dynamic use of price sets might be in order.
3. We'd like to make our busy events program as legible as possible so the visual representation of events is important to us. Also it would be good to have the ability to differentiate and headline events, perhaps even automatically headlining events that are immanent, important or underbooked.
4. We have a related wellbeing project represented by a different site at breathingspacelondon.org.uk , it would be very desirable for the same database to power both sites.
5. Our centre has half a dozen spaces with several events to fit in most days. At present scheduling events, school visits, meetings etc so that there aren't any room booking clashes is quite a painstaking effort. It would be great if CiviCRM could play a part in resource/room booking as well as event booking.
6. A very unusual use case for many Buddhist organisations. Buddhists have a very inconvenient (for a database!) requirement to change their names when they become ordained. To make this edge-case even more challenging the ordained names are a single name, it would be lovely to have a database that could honour the change from two names to one.