CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I think your misunderstanding the use of contact types, and I don't think you need a work around.

You need to first create a "special" organization, which is your organization, and which is the membership-holding organization (membership categories are connected to this special organization). You can have more than one "special" organization if you want to.

ANY contact type can be a member of this "special" organization.

When defining the membership type, you have the option of selecting a predefined relationship that defines membership "inheritance."

For example, I have an association I work with. They have 12 membership categories. 11 of the 12 are organization based -- meaning the organization itself is the entity becoming a member. The last category is individual-based.

I want all of the employees to "inherit" the membership status from their parent organization. So I've set that option in the membership type configuration. Consequently, Jane Doe, employee of ACME Corp, has a current membership record in her individual record by way of inheritance (since ACME Corp is a member in good standing).

One caveat -- there currently is no way to strictly limit membership categories to a specific contact type. This must be handled procedurally. In the example above, the "ABC Membership Type" could be applied to an individual -- the software does not allow you to define the type as an organization-specific type (maybe for a future release?...). In my experience, that just means its important to educate whomever is handling the admin work to make sure they apply the membership to the right entity.

Your question regarding registration --

Would this then allow Business Contacts to register for events along with employee

On one hand, I don't think there's anything that prohibits you from registering a company/org for an event. But since that doesn't really make any sense, since "companies" don't usually get up and attend an event, I would recommend treating the contact types in their most logical usage -- i.e. it's the employee who attends the event.

As to hierarchal organizations --
To some degree, the relationships mechanism is flexible enough to create any hierarchy you want. You can create organization-to-organization relationships, or whatever. The two special relationship (employee/employer and household member/household) get some special treatment at various places within CiviCRM. But you could create a "parent company/daughter company" or "corporate office/satellite office" or other such relationships, if you wanted to. The current searching mechanism does have some limitations on the ease of extracting that information in a meaningful way. But the structure is there.

-Brian