CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

This thread has spawned from http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,3394.0.html (How to set up roles when we don't know the person eg 'The Principal' at School X)

A similar dilemma to how we deal with a 'position' when we don't know the person (eg The Principal at School X) affects how we deal with people who have multiple personas/roles that requires them to be on different mailing lists in each role. In other words they are to get  information sent to the  post/email address for the relevant role (based on which Mailing List each role is linked to).

Example: Busy Lizzie is a member of our organisation and also has a role in it (eg on our Board). She is also employed in another Organisation, eg GoodLife and in that role needs to be sent relevant info (eg on Transport Issues).

She should get all her internal mailings and membership stuff at her home address (Home is set as Primary). But I need to ensure that in her GoodLife role she receives info that goes to the Transport Mailing List and that she gets that information sent to her GoodLife address.

What makes sense just now is that as well as Individuals and Organisations being Contact Types there is Position/Office ( ie a position is an 'entity' since it exists even if we don't know the person in it, or if the position is vacant. And of course the 'position' continues but the person in that role changes.).

So for my example of wanting to mail to 'The Principal' at a particular school - or Director of a particular Organisation - when I don't know the person in that role, i set up a contact (Position) with title of Principal (or Director) - i set a relationship to the School (or Organisation) - and we can set the Principal/Director's record to use the Organisational address, but is likely to have it's own phone, and possibly a generic email. This Contact is then put on various mailing List.

If I happen to know the name of The Principal/Director (or the person in the role has just changed), then I create an Individual record (unless the person already exists as a Contact), and create a relationship between the Individual and the Position (and somehow this therefore also creates the relationship to the Organisation).

When I do a mailing to a list that the Director is on, it puts in the name of the person (if known).

If I don't know the person in the Position, then the system works as needed. If I do know the person then the system works.

It also has the advantage that if the person in the role changes, then the information about the contacts with the Position is retained - which would be a significant gain to my mind - and I would ideally be able to identify people who held that role previously.

And if the person has more than one persona then the information related to each persona goes to the right addresses by being linked to the Position not the Person.

Happy to be told there is an easier and tidier way of doing this. (And I haven't thought through the above for when positions are shared)

Thanks Xavier - because we are only just doing the import we haven't had to do one of our large mailouts yet that would cover individuals and organisations. So your point may be helpful at that point. So if we have an individual who is a Principal then the mailout is addressed directly to them, and if we have no Principal then we put link the School (Organisation) to the custom data (or direct to the Mailing List Group). I can see that works for this aspect of the problem - as does Lobo's suggested hack http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,3394.0.html that uses the Individual (my preference is to have the Individual exist so we are usually setting the custom data to an individual not an organisation).

Not sure I can see how to apply the same logic to cover my example of Busy Lizzie (but not suggesting you were suggesting it would).

At Lobo's suggestion as he sees some merit in this approach (well he isn't writing it off yet at least  ) have put up a wiki page here which has what i hope is a more rationale explanation and argument http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/New+contact+type+for+Position+or+Office