How to set up roles when we don't know the person eg 'The Principal' at School X

[petednz]

Finally getting on to pulling all our old contacts in that have organisations. A whole load of them have no named person, eg of 200 schools, 50 only have The Principal as the contact.
ANy suggestions on how we set this up. Obviously I can set up the 'School X' - then I need to set up a 'role' that relates to that position. If it was a person I would use 'employee of' but how do I handle generic titles. I am going to keep running in to this as I build up media lists, as in needing 'The Editor' at such and such a publication.
I suppose I could use NickName but can see that being missed in mailouts!

[Kurund Jalmi]

May be you should create a group called "Principal" and give required permission to this group ? But you will have to manually add concern people to this group.

kurund

[petednz]

Issue for me is that this needs to be easy to handle for mailing labels - and set up so when we do know the persons name we can enter it. i think i will have to have a lot of contacts with no first and no last - lobo won't like that!

[Kurund Jalmi]

Can you use custom data for this? I think you can add custom data for mailing labels.
Check Global Settings>>Address settings

kurund

[petednz]

May not have explained the question.

I can set the school up as organisation. I can set 'the principal' up as an individual. but if i do that and use 'relationships' for 'employee of' i will end up with one hundred individuals who have no first name or last name, have a position, and have a work address, but may not have an email.

I don't think this is good, but it best reflects how I would do it for those for whom I do have the name.

[Donald Lobo]

you dont really have an individual in this case, do you?

You have a template/rule that all "principals" follow for a school. You'd like to use the same template for schools where the individual is not known

a not-so-ugly hack to get around civicrm limitations, could be to give all such people "Name Unknown" as first name and "School X" as last name (or some combination). Any export/mailing labels you do can filter on the above labels (some custom code will be needed for this)

lobo

[petednz]

Hey Lobo - trying to think this through in the large scheme of things - and have shifted to more generic thread http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,3405.0.html