CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hey guys,

I am currently trying to customize CiviCRM for the Red Cross of Mozambique and I was looking for suggestions. I have been working with CiviCRM for about 8 months now but we are planning to test live in a month or so and was looking for advice.

Basically I am trying to decide if i should use activities, organizations (local / provincial, all under the national office), groups or tags. There are 6000 volunteers spread across the entire country organized my Province, district, project cluster (ie. health, disaster management, water and sanitation, etc), and specific projects. There are also "Active" volunteers (on a project) and "Inactive" volunteers (project has finished). <--would be great if this updated automatically.

Not asking you to do my job for me, but are there any suggestions from more experienced CiviCRM users? Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again!

Hi,

There is more than one way to skin a cat.
The best way of segmenting your base is as much related to what you want to model as to how you want to use it.

What do you want to do with your volunteers? send them sms/emails? what are going to be the criteria, assuming you won't send each message to all of them?

The right segmentation is the one that allows you to quickly reach the contacts you want, while making it easy for your users to understand your segmentation. For most of our customers that have a complex contact base, when the question is should I use custom fields, tags, groups, memberships or contact types, the best answer is often all of the above.

As for the cat, one option to consider might be to leave the skin on his back?

good luck, but don't worry too much about it, no matter how much you plan the future will bring a need that will screw up your carefully designed segmentation... and it's more than likely that civi is flexible enough to cope and you'll be able to adjust the model anyway.

X+