CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We have the following situation:

Individuals are employed by one or more companies. These individuals are part of groups in which they represent one of the companies they work for and perform a task (i.e. chairman, secretary). These 'workgroups' are subgroups in a hierarchical structure of programs and sectors.

Example:

John Doe is chairman of workgroup Vegetation protection on behalf of the company Greentone. Workgroup Vegetation protection is part of the program Forrest management in the sector Environment.
Individuals cannot be part of programs and/or sectors directly.

(Key data we want to store in CiviCRM in bold)

Since we also need to be able to send mailings to workgroups, we tried to set this up using the default group functionality of CiviCRM. However, there is no way to set an individual's position within the group. Also using parent groups, we could not enforce the hierarchy mentioned above.

Using contacts to represent workgroups, programs and sectors does offer a way to set up hierarchy and allows individuals to be refered to by position using relationships. The problem here is that it is not possible to address mailings to contacts (and their relationships). Scheduling events is also problematic, since only the workgroup itself appears on the participant's list.

Maybe we could combine group and contact functionality. But what is the right way to go there? (Without having too much redundancy)