Author Topic: Organizations vs. Households (Read 1512 times)

ataylor · August 06, 2007, 10:24:10 am

I'm testing CiviCRM for our nonprofit membership association, in which the organization is the member and the individual is merely the representative/contact for that membership. When we send renewals to our full members, we are invoicing the organization, not the individual. We also may have several individuals working in the organization that should have separate user accounts.

I'm wondering if I should be setting up these member organizations as HOUSEHOLDS rather than ORGANIZATIONS. That way, I can use the "household member of" relationship to flag the primary member contact for the organization, and include multiple individual members under that umbrella.

Has anyone else tried this? Or struggled with a situation where the organization, not the individual, is a member within CiviCRM?

Dave Greenberg · August 06, 2007, 12:15:42 pm

CiviCRM currently handles maintaining records of Organizations which are "members" of an association in the "back-end" reasonably well. You can also create additional "Relationship Types" (Administer CiviCRM >> Relationship Types) to link "primary member contact for...", "other contact for", etc. to each of your member organizations. Based on your description of your requirements so far, I'm don't see what benefit you'd get from using Household instead of Organization.

Where things get tricky is making these link happen from front-end (constituent-facing) screens. By default, CiviCRM creates Individual contact records when people register as Drupal or Joomla! users. This means that the following use case is NOT possible out of the box:

"Jane Smith registers at your website as the primary contact for her organization and fills in contact info for both herself and her organization. CiviCRM creates the organization record, Jane's record, and gives her ongoing permission to view and maintain her organization's info."

HOWEVER, we are currently working with Kabissa - an organization whose members are organizations - to implement this functionality. The specifications are here:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Kabissa+-+CiviCRM+Project+Specifications

The project is in progress and hopefully will be completed in the next month or so. Code will be an open-source "extension" intiially. The intent is to generalize the functionality at some point in the future, and integrate it into the core CiviCRM codebase.

ataylor · August 07, 2007, 08:53:11 am

Many thanks, Dave,

Sounds like we can stick to the Organizations approach and await future functionality. Our association is fairly small, so we can manage some of the specific organization/individual issues on the back end.

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Author Topic: Organizations vs. Households (Read 1512 times)

ataylor

Organizations vs. Households

Dave Greenberg

Re: Organizations vs. Households

ataylor

Re: Organizations vs. Households