CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

depends on your process. Simple use is to say that everybody is a donor as soon as they have made a contribution.
But that is not always reflecting the real world. What do you want to record on a donor subtype which isn't on other types.

 Thanks, Coleman and Jaap.

Coleman, when you say "sub-types of individual always seem to be redundant with other data," are you thinking in terms of groups and tags?

As I see it, just starting to feel my way into CiviCRM, when I create a contact, I could assign it to one or more groups or I could create it as one or more sub-types. Are you suggesting that taking the "groups" route proves more useful because groups are "smart"?

 

As pete said, sub-types are only really useful for limiting the scope of custom data.
Sub-types, tags, and groups (exception: smart groups) all have the limitation that they have to be manually updated.
Instead, try to structure your database around naturally occurring events. For example, if you create a smart group of everyone who has given a donation, then all donors will be in that group by virtue of having donated - no need for some poor intern to sit at a keyboard all day updating people's group status (and much more reliable).

Pete - I had a similar situation at woolman and resisted the urge to create a sub-type. Instead I used the hook for contact tabs to hide the custom student tabs for non-students (using relationship data to determine if they were a student or not). A bit of coding up front, but less manual data wrangling for staff.