CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi, I am new to CiviCRM,
I have read the user and administrator guide and played around.
what i would like to do is 
I have a list of organizations and a list of contact people belonging to these organizations.
but some organizations have more than one contact and i am wondering if there is a way to control whether i send emails to all contacts or main contact in these organizations when i send a bulk email?
Would anyone shed some light?
Best regards,

Hi Vicky,

To build a bit on what Erik said - I do this now for billing contacts at an organization.

* Create the "Main Contact" relationship type (Administer menu -> Customize Data and Screens -> Relationship types) as Erik suggested.
* In advanced search (Search menu -> Advanced Search), go to the "Relationships" section, and select "Main Contact", press Search.
* Optionally, save the search as a smart group.

Jon

Thank you for all your replies
but The problem is there is an organization which has no contact person, then i need to put the email and phone number directly into this organization,
in this case, using the search to create a smart group will miss out all these organizations?? please advise

Hi Vicky,

we have been dealing with a very similar challenge and found an approach that works for us - it is a bit lenghty and complicated though:

1. Find all Contact Persons and put them in a group:

• create a relationship just as described by Erik and Jon
• then use the advanced search to find all contact persons (of organisations matching your selection criteria) and put them in a (smart) group (Group 1)

2. Find organisations without contact persons an put them in a group:

• search for all organisations (matching your selection criteria) in your database and put them in a (smart) group (Group 2)
• find all organisations (matching your selection criteria) that have contact persons and put them in a (smart) group (Group 3)
• use the include-exclude search to find all organisation: include contacts from Group 2, exclude contacts from Group 3
• the result will be all organisations without contact persons - put them in yet another group (Group 4)

3. Send your Mailing to contact persons (where applicable) or to the organisation itself (when tehy have no contact person):

• send your mailing to group 1 and 4

Summing up, this works for us but we (and some other users we know) think that this is way to complicated. Other CRM-Systems offer much more comfortable ways to deal with the (quite common) "contact person challenge".

If many other users consider this a problem too it may be a good extension that could for example be realized in a make it happen project.

Best Regards
Fabian