Quickstart Define Contacts

CiviCRM provides you three types of contacts:

Individuals
Households
Organizations

Contacts can be considered anyone you would send an email or letter to. For example, you might send a solicitation letter to the Mr. & Ms. John Smith household, rather than sending individuals letters to John Smith and Jane Smith. You might contact the Intel Corporation, rather than contacting a single individual there.

Contacts can be related to one another through Relationships. Contact A is Bill Smith (individual). Contact B is Intel Corporation (organization). A can be related to B via an "employee" releationship or perhaps a "Board Member" relationship.

Example: Defining your Contacts

For the Social Source Foundation, we need the following types of contacts:
1. OpenNGO registrants/ community members. This is the union of CiviCRM wiki registrants, JIRA (bug tracking) registrants, crm-dev email list members, and www.openngo.org registrants. All the folks working to make this thing a success.
2. Social Source Foundation Funders/ opinion makers. Collection of folks I need to track and communicate with primarily for fundraising purposes.
3. OpenNGO "partners". These are the companies, organizations and individuals that make up our ISV (independent software vendor) community-- folks that sell stuff/services based on OpenNGO technology.
4. CiviCRM Users. These are folks who have/will have/ should have production installs of CiviCRM.
5. SSF staff.

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