CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

First off I hope this is the right forum for this type of questions.

I'm deciding between CiviCRM and Saleforce in a conversion from Qbase fundraising which is quiting.  I'm evaluating a number of features.  Most of them I can figure out.   Some of them of course aren't as easy.

We are based around a university.  We have several types of constituents, undergrads, grads, alumns, local, parent of undergrad, etc.  In what we are currently using, when an undergrad reached their expected grad date, it automatically changes them from an undergrad to alumn.  We also have the parent of undergrad automatically change.  This done through stop and start dates so we retain when they were a student and their class year.

We have different appeals, activities, communications, email blasts to these different groups so it's important to be able to easy query up a list of people in each group.

About the only thing I found that would do this automatic switching and is also easy to query up the group is membership, but it feels a bit like round peg in a square hole.  One has to set a bunch of things in creating the membership that just don't make sense like contribution type and then one has to create an organization which isn't really an organization. 

Is there a better way?