Board Member *Position* as Individual

[joecivi]

Not sure how to approach this. An organization needs to deal with "Secretary of Board A" as somewhat distinct from who the person is who holds that office:

A person P is a Board Memeber of Organization A and Organization B.

A CiviCRM mailing goes out to a group which includes board members of Org A and Org B. In their capacity as board member in Org A, P likes to get their email in a certain format (html or plaintext) and their physical mail at Address AD1. In their capacity as board member in Org B, P likes to get their email in a certain format and their physical mail at AD2.

P should not receive two copies of the CiviCRM mailing. P has weighted his Organizational Memberships so that Org A takes precedence over Org B and so the communications settings for Org A should be in force for this communication.

The communication needs to go to official channels, so it goes to a Quasi Person Individual in Civi. In this case the mailing goes to Board President of Org A and Board Secretary of Org B and they need to appear as contacts in Civi.

I want to minimize redundancy. Don't want to hand copy in contact info from Person P into Board President of Org A and Board Secretary of Board B (although if programatic, this may make sense). It seems hooks or references of relationships may suffice to connect the Quasi Person to the Real Person. When communication needs to happen, the correct email address, physical address, etc would need to be used and "filled in".

I might implement this with a Board Position as a subtype of Individual which would reference a contact and address type in that contact.

Any suggestions appreciated. Doubt if I'm the first to wrassle with this.

Thank you Civi!

[JohnFF]

I'm a bit confused:

If it's a group that contains one contact then it'll only send to him once. Do you have two separate records for P?

[joecivi]

I'm running with one contact for P the person. One contact for the Board President of Org A and one for the Secretary of Board B. As I understand it, all these entities are needed. At present these are all the same individual person.

An official communication goes out to board members of Org A and Org B (in one mailing). Membership in Org A and Org B may change frequently and some individuals will sit on multiple Boards/Orgs. The official comm. needs to go to the board members.

So the long winded answer is I have 3 (kind of) 

[joanne]

I don't think you will be able to do what you want without custom coding.  And you may well be the first to wrestle with allowing so much flexibility for each person.

A couple of questions/thoughts in no particular order (which are all intertwined because your proposed system is rather complex.)

• Will Person 1 be using the same email address be the same for for Org A and for Org B
• Why must people receive only one email?  By allowing them to choose to receive email in different formats depending on the Org involved you are creating independence for each role, then you want to negate that by sending one email for both roles.
• How are you going to record  order of precedence for the orgs each person belongs to?
• How many people, Orgs and postions are involved? You may create an unmanageable system if you set up a new contact for each "role" ie 10 people who could belong to 5 different boards means 50 'contacts'
• You don't want to manually copy info, but will let them have different addresses - these are another set of competing requirements.
• Is it essential to give them so much flexibility in how and where they receive communications?  If not, then setting up the people and the Orgs and linking them via relationships such as "Board President for" should simplify things.
• If they really must receive only one email then you may need to send a series of emails for each communication.

[joecivi]

Joanne,

Thanx for the thoughtful response:

1) I can custom code. I'm a Drupal hacker. I've written some perl that analyzes relationships between quasi people and the real people based on referenced address selection in Civi.

2) Maybe multiple emails OK. Just one is best I think. Not sure what Civi does if an email appears twice in a mail list. I'm planning on weighted quasi roles, so prefs for "President of Board A" can override prefs for "Secretary of Board B" and only one email goes to "President of Board A".

3) Order of precedence is via a weight.

4) 500+ people, 100+ orgs.

5) Addresses are good OOB: you can already select an address from another contact. This points to someone thinking something similar to what I'm considering (and it getting into core!). So "President of Board A"'s address is linked to Person P. If similar linking (referencing) could happen for email addr, etc. I'd be a lot closer.

6) Unclear how much flexibility is needed. It would be good to get into testing. This project in early stages. Your suggestion appears to imply a one to one relationship Person P <-> Board President for Org A. I've already been told we need more than that. Person P is also the Secretary for Org B.

7) In Drupal I say "anything is possible, some things are hard." When Civi does a mailing, it takes a breath and looks at the recipient list first I assume. (For a scheduled mailing, for sure.) If I can nail down the logic, I think I could revise the recipient list based on the weighting of quasi people. Or the higest ranked quasi person for a real person gets their email filled in at mailing time(?). I think Civi hooks may make some of this possible.

Thanx all.

[joanne]

RE:

2)When you are creating a mailing in CiviMail there is a Remove duplicate emails? tick box  But if person P1 wants a plain text email for Org B and an HTML email for ORG A and Org B rates higher on his preference list than than org A, then with standard civicrm and one mailing you couldn't guarantee that it would be a plain text email that was sent.  That is why I suggested you might need some sort of iterative process making use of the feature "exclude all those who received mailing X" 

5) I knew you could select an address from another contact, but we don't use that feature and I had always assumed it would automatically be the primary address from the other contact - good to know that you can chose any address.  I think the shared address feature was originally designed for use with households but obviously it can be used in other contexts.

6) Relationships can be many to many.  So person 1  could have relationship of "Board President for" Org A and relationship of "Board Secretary for " Org B and relationships of "board member for" each of Orgs C, D and E if you want.  Equally you could have person 1 with the relationship "holds the position" Board president for Org A and also the relationship "holds the position" Board secretary for Org B etc.  One way of doing it requires a few more relationship types but perhaps wouldn't give the email/address flexibility you think you are after and the other requires a lot of quasi people.

Also, if someone is on 5 boards could they need up to 5 different location types because they get the mail for each board sent to a different postal box address?

You haven't said whether or not people will be self-servicing via the website in terms of changes of address if they move etc.  Our experience has been that the more address location types you have the bigger mess people can get things into if they are making changes themselves. 

And that is probably the limit of the "help" I can offer as I am not a coder.

[joecivi]

*CiviMail* and removing dupes: see http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php?topic=26791.0 wherein no answer is found to "which contact with email e gets removed from mailing". That does seem like a point in the code where some new logic could get introduced: before running the dedupe rules, let me run the quasi person removal rules. Seems to me the mailing just goes to Board Members (quasi people or official people), so the special rules apply only to the quasi people. Note that I think we're looking for similar functionality on physical mail, but it's harder to detect a dupe, because addresses may be different. Oy!

*Addresses* I was hoping to use the standard address options, but I've added a custom field: "which email address" to specify for a quasi person, which one of their real person email types to use. Real addresses are specified with the real person, references are used in the quasi person. Civi implements this for physical address with a reference OOB, I'm implementing for email in a similar fashion. So no, I don't need 5 location types. Each quasi person (Board Member) has 1 referenced real person, 1 referenced email for that real person and 1 physical address for that real person. People will not be self-servicing address changes. Address changes should happen in one place then get reflected in the referencing places.

*Relationships* I want to make this as simple as possible with no redundancy. One quasi person is only one real person. One real person could be 5 quasi persons: Secretary of Board A, Treasurer of Board B, etc. You're talking about lots of relationships. I'm talking about lots of quasi people. The quasi people can get things attached: mailing prefs, addresses, etc. The relationships can't. I appreciate the power of relationships, but don't think they are the right tool for this use case. At present I'm using NO relationships. The connection is determined by the referenced address.