CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I work for an organization that is a little complicated (don't we all).

We have 2 annual membership types: Individual and Organization Members.
I have no issue with Individuals; they're straight-forward enough.

However, Organizations have a Declared representative, and an Alternate. These representatives can change every year.

I also want to keep track of staff of my organization (who cannot be members), members of the Board, and members of the Steering Committee. Board members sit for 2 years, Steering Committee members are 2 years, and staff varies. All memberships, however, need to be renewed every year. It would also be great to be able to mark past Board members, so when a newbie staff member comes on they can glean a bit of history from looking at the membership database. In a perfect world, I'd like to be able to track Organizations, since some years they've been members, and some years they have not.

I'm pretty confused about profiles, membership types, and tags. I think this is how things should be set up, so correct me if I'm wrong:

1. Set up an Organization Member as a Family, with the declared rep and alternate as members of the "Family."
2. Use tags to designate Staff, Board members, SC members, and to differentiate Declared reps from Alternate reps.

Is this the most logical method of organizing my members? Do profiles come into play at all? Is there any way to mark in the setup Organizations that were members, say from 2000-2004, then were not involved, and then came back in 2008?

I'm not a developer, and so I'm looking for the easiest way to do things.

I also want to set things up so when the end of our fiscal year comes up, members will get a reminder, and then be able to adjust their own information if they need to when they renew their information. I'm working in Drupal.

Thanks so much.