CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

I am currently starting to design a CiviCRM system that will be used by a membership organisation that has different chapters across the UK. I'm thinking that I will use CiviMember and CiviContribute to keep track of membership dues. However, the different chapters are organised first into about 100 districts, which are then organised into about a dozen regions. I want to be able to track certain information about each district and region (officers, coordinator, etc).

I am thinking that I will either directly use CiviMember to link individuals to their chapter, or perhaps just use a relationship type to keep track of this. Since there are hundreds of local chapters, I think a huge list of membership types in CiviMember would be unwieldy and so I'm tempted to use relationships to link the person to the chapter.

So far so good, but at this point I'm thinking that there would be three types of organisations: chapters, districts and regions. Then I could use relationships to say Chapter X belongs to District Y. That's fine, but when I go to create that relationship I'm going to see chapters, districts and regions all mixed up. An alternative to relationships would be to use a contact reference field, but I'm still left with the problem that all these different organisation types would be mixed up on the list.

Is there any way to set up new contact types in CiviCRM? That way chapters, districts and regions could all be properly differentiated types of objects. I think the contact types are rather hard-coded into the system, so I have my doubts that this is possible. Alternately, would it be a huge amount of work to alter the relationship handling so that when setting up a relationship type, I could specify Contact A (must be an organisation, subtype chapter) belongs to district Contact B (must be an organisation, subtype district).

I know this is rather vague, but I hope it makes sense. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

Best wishes,
-Ian