Recording Constituency, candidate and election information

[petermcandrew]

At the next UK general election we will be standing candidates in constituencies across England and Wales.  I am currently looking into the best way to structure this information about our constituencies and candidates in Civi.  We also plan to make the information accessible using a series of Drupal 'views' for internal and public use. It would be great to get your views on all of this...

As it is not currently possible to create custom contact types, the best approach I have found would be to rename the 'Household' contact type and change it to 'Area', within Area I would then create custom contact sub-types such as Constituency.  This approach also means that we can scale the solution beyond the General Election to 'local' and 'European' elections, where candidates will stand for 'councils' and 'regions' respectively.  Using a separate contact type will also give me better control over where custom data fields appear.

From 'area' I would then have relationships to individuals holding different roles e.g. press officer, campaign manager, candidate, etc.

It's worth mentioning that we don't currently use 'household' and have no plan to use it in the future.  However I'm aware of some logic which only applies to households, such as merging on export.  As far as I can tell this shouldn't be too much of an issue and we could hide/disable this feature so as not to confuse users, but there may be other logic I have overlooked?

I wonder if anyone has any suggestions or advice on this approach, or perhaps you may have even modelled something similar? in which case I'd be keen what you did.

Thanks!