Author Topic: People & Organisations with more than one role / area of interest (Read 1202 times)

andyk · February 24, 2013, 03:58:48 am

hi all

I'm evaluating civiCRM on behalf of a small UK environmental charity and we have done some initial requirements gathering. This has highlighted that the people and organisations with whom they interact can

play many roles (eg they could be a "general purpose" volunteer, but also be a home energy consultant)
have many areas of interest, eg an individual could be interested in food and transport

Need to be able to select people / orgs for mailouts and other reporting using this data...

Can anyone suggest the best ways of using civiCRM to meet those needs?

Many thanks!!

Andy

Erik Hommel · February 24, 2013, 04:32:26 am

For the volunteer requirement:

you can set up several relationship types, one for each type of volunteer.
you can use a generic relationship Volunteer and set up groups (with a parent/child relationship) to distinguish between the subtypes

[li[you can use tags (with a parent/child relationship) to distinguish between the different sets[/li]
[/list]

You could also use groups and tags for the areas of interest too, and each individual could have one or many. So CiviCRM can deal with both requests easily.

kharding · February 24, 2013, 08:26:38 am

Depending on your data needs as well, you could easily rely on one of CiviCRM's strong points to capture this data - you can create custom data sets that capture the information you want (ie, "type" of volunteer or interest area) and then use that to create smart groups for the data pull you need for your mailouts.

Two CiviCRM 'extensions' - CiviEngage and CiviCampaign - start to do this, with some custom data fields that allow you to check off kinds of qualities/quasi-relationships that a contact may have; they could be "volunteers," "board members," "supporters," while with "media contact" contact types, you could select their "beat" or the subject that they cover the most.

Extensible data is pretty awesome.

andyk · February 24, 2013, 08:54:27 am

Very many thanks for these pointers

I will check those features out.

Kind regards

Andy

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Author Topic: People & Organisations with more than one role / area of interest (Read 1202 times)

andyk

People & Organisations with more than one role / area of interest

Erik Hommel

Re: People & Organisations with more than one role / area of interest

kharding

Re: People & Organisations with more than one role / area of interest

andyk

Re: People & Organisations with more than one role / area of interest