Author Topic: Need suggestions about configuring my contact/groups/tags (Read 969 times)

Yaazkal · July 29, 2012, 02:51:47 pm

Hello, I have a question about how to organize my information. We have an artistic organization. We have dancers, musicians, painters,photographers, etc. Dancers can be ballet dancer, belli dancer, break dance and so on. Some of the dancers (or any other artist) works as volunteers and in some cases we pay them. Also we have customers that by us a show. There is a park in our city when we make art performances for free and there are artists that make their show for free, so we want to call them "guest artist". Also we are building a "database" with artists contact information that we want to invite in the future to join us or to sell them products when we have them (I don't know how to call them, prospects?). Some artists are members of the organization. A guest artist could become an artist of the organization in the future.

What do you recommend to me in my group/tag mapping of the contacts?

I'm thinking about this but I'm not really sure:

Contact type: artist
Groups:
- Organization artists
- Guest artists
- Uncategorized artists (don't know how to call them, artists mailing list?).
Tags:
- Use the Voulteer tag when applicable.
- A set of tags called "Artist type" (to choose dancer, photographer, painter, etc. Only for contact type artist)
- A set of tags called "Speciallity" (to choose ballet for example when the artist is a dancer. Only for contact type artist)

is this a good content distribution? any advice?

We also have customers, do we need to create a contact type "customer" or just a group called "customers"?

Thanks for your time !

petednz · July 29, 2012, 09:13:06 pm

In general the only reason we use a sub Contact Type is because we have Custom Fields that relate to them and not to others.

If you are planning on using CiviMail then you will probably want to be making Groups for those particular characteristics - though you can use Tags and then Smart Group off them.

Tags show on your Contact Summary Screen - Groups don't - and Smart Groups don't yet show on Group Tab.

You have probably read this http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC41/Tags+vs.+Groups+vs.+Custom+Fields

(I just found a 2007 print out of that from my very first civi project!)

Sometimes it really is just worth going 'both' routes for a bit until you get a sense of which makes more sense in each case.

Yaazkal · July 31, 2012, 07:58:03 am

Hello Pete, thank you so much for your advice. That link is pretty useful !

I'll try really understand and try for my best choice.

Have a nice day

Jason W · October 18, 2012, 11:32:58 am

Hello Yaazkal,

Personally I am a fan of groups for organizing contacts (as opposed to tags). I would use something like this:

Artist Group
- Dancer Group
-- Ballet Group
-- Belly Dancer Group
-- Break Dancer Group

I would then create Volunteer and Paid tags for use in the lower tier groups (i.e. Volunteer Ballet, or Paid Belly Dancer). This way, if you need to find a volunteer Break Dancer, you can perform a search in the Break Dancer Group for contacts with the Volunteer tag, and the search will return only those contacts.

You can also find All of your dancers by searching for the Dancer parent group. This method also allows you to search for all of your Volunteer or Paid Artists (regardless of they're specialization) by searching for the appropriate tag.

Cheers,
Jason

CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

News:

Author Topic: Need suggestions about configuring my contact/groups/tags (Read 969 times)

Yaazkal

Need suggestions about configuring my contact/groups/tags

petednz

Re: Need suggestions about configuring my contact/groups/tags

Yaazkal

Re: Need suggestions about configuring my contact/groups/tags

Jason W

Re: Need suggestions about configuring my contact/groups/tags