CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm looking for some guidance/best practices on how to categorize people in an alumni database using a combination of groups, tags, and relationships.

I'm setting up an online alumni database/system using CiviCRM, and also using CiviContribute and (later, maybe) CiviMail for email promotions. This system will not only how alumni, but also past and current teachers, students, and the parents of students and alumni.

Right now, I'm just trying to set up the basic framework. My intention is to have the site be fairly self-service, so alumni can log in themselves, create profiles, and search other users' profiles to meet up or get back in touch. (Just using contact forms for that, I don't want to publicize personal data to non-admins/volunteers)

My goal is to categorize alum as follows:

• Years of attendance (first, last)
• Role in school during attendance (student, faculty, parent of student, volunteer)
• Relationships to other members (parent of student x, sibling of student y)
  
• Privacy opt-in/out (to a granular level, so we have prefs for fund raising, requents for volunteering, newsletters, etc.)
• Interesting in volunteering in multiple categories (fund raising, mentoring, on-site volunteering, teaching/lecturing)
• Basic demographics (location, age, etc.)

I expect for an administrator to identify potential volunteers, contact them when we need them, and add them to groups as appropriate to maintain contact with them.

My hunch is that a lot of this is just custom fields, and I'll just search/filter by them as necessary, and use smart groups for some of it.

Where I'm particularly stuck is on the role in school and explicit interpersonal relationships.

Relationships seem well handled by relationships (duh). But so does role in school, or so it seems to me. Alternately, role can just be a tag or even a custom field. (Someone CAN have many roles)

How should I best categorize all this information to ensure a robust database that's easy to use for both the registrant and for admins/volunteers who need to keep in touch with these people?

Hi,

There is more than one way of doing it (ie. civicrm is as good as perl .

My own personal rule of thumb is to use relations when it is functionally a relation (keep in mind the limition as just described by dave), tag for "soft" categories (eg interested in volunteering) and group for hard ones (student, parent, sibling...)


    * Years of attendance (first, last)
    * Role in school during attendance (student, faculty, parent of student, volunteer)
relationship (or membership ?)
    * Relationships to other members (parent of student x, sibling of student y)
relationship
    * Privacy opt-in/out (to a granular level, so we have prefs for fund raising, requents for volunteering, newsletters, etc.)
Not sure about your need
    * Interesting in volunteering in multiple categories (fund raising, mentoring, on-site volunteering, teaching/lecturing)
tags
    * Basic demographics (location, age, etc.)
standard tags (location, birthday)+ custom tags



Good luck !

Thanks for the nice feedback. One really helpful thing you can do to support the project is to post a description of how you / your organization is using CiviCRM on the Showcase section of this forum. These real-life examples (with as much detail about the organization and your processes as you have time to share) are really helpful for other folks evaluating whether CiviCRM is a good fit for their organizations. :-)

http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/board,4.0.html