CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

In our association some people choose to train as counsellors.  They then volunteer as trained counsellors within the association.  Finally when they have had had enough they resign as a counsellor.   
In our current system people have an activity type of trainee where we keep track of trainee start date and trainee end date, followed by a Counsellor activity where we keep rack of Counsellor start date and counsellor end date (and if the counsellor is on leave for personal reasons).  We need to be able to create lists of current trainees, current counsellors, counsellors on leave  and of those who have have start or end dates within certain date ranges.

I was thinking of using Tags to designate someone as a trainee or a counsellor, but as we will want to send an email to, say, all counsellors who live in a particular state, perhaps it would be better to use groups (groups will also be used for collections of people in a geographic location - some will be counsellors and some won't - but I believe groups in CiviCRM are not mutually exclusive).

My question is how would it be best to keep a record of the start and end dates  (and leave dates) for trainees and for counsellors?  Should I add custom fields to activity types of counsellors and trainee that I create, or should I use Civicase somehow?  It will be admin staff who sign people on or off as a trainee or counsellor, not the volunteers themselves.

Any advice would be appreciated, or point me in the direction of an existing post if you think this issue has already been addressed elsewhere.

Thanks for that suggestion, I had only been thinking about relationships between people (which is how our current database works).  One question though, in the section on searching for relationships the CiviCRM documentation states  "You may also get a message that too many results were found and you will need to provide more information to narrow the search." How many is too many?  We have about active 1000 counsellors and will want to send emails to them en masse.

Also, the user interface for creating relationships has been improved in 3.2 to remove that restriction.