Return to Quickstart Guide

Relationships, groups and tags in CiviCRM are purposely flexible and can be used in a variety of ways. The method you employ depends on what you plan to use CiviCRM for.

Relationship types define a relationship between two contacts. For instance Sam is an employee of the Social Source Foundation or Frank is the son of Mary. Relationships between the "owner" of the database and contacts in the database will be most often coded as groups (e.g. Volunteers). If the database "owner" is Social Source Foundation, I'd probably put Frank in a group called employees rather than create an employee relationship between the Social Source Foundation organization and the Frank individual.

Groups are collections of contacts that a user of the software will regularly take action on. CiviCRM allows you to take actions on a group, for example send them an email, or map them on Google Maps.

Tags are a "free form" categorization tool that describes characteristics of a contact. For example, Sam is interested in Global Warning, so his contact record might be tagged "global warming." Tags are pre-defined. CiviCRM does not yet support user-defined tagging as we see in del.icio.us or Flickr.

(A) Define your contacts (individuals, households and organizations)

What contacts will be contained in your database? If you focus on individual donors, you might simply store individual contact records. If you plan to replace a standard nonprofit database, you'll probably use individuals and organizations. If you do political action or sophistocated individual donor work, households will be usefull.

(B) For each contact type, define relevant relationships, groups and tags that you plan on using.

Example: Defining your Contacts One example might be the Social Source Foundation database that tracks the members of the CiviCRM community.   Individuals Organizations Households All Note Relationships Employee       Keep track of who in the CiviCRM community is employed at which organization   Consultant Consultant     Keep track of who has done consulting jobs for whom in the CiviCRM community Groups       Newsletter Record who gets sent a monthly newsletter Tags       Custom Development Keep track of what services people and organizations offer the CiviCRM community         Installation Keep track of what services people and organizations offer the CiviCRM community

(C) Code the relationship types and tags.

• Click on "Administer CiviCRM"
• Select the "Relationship Types" icon
• Create new relationship types by clicking the "» New Relationship Type" hyperlink at the bottom of the list of relationships.
• Select the "Tags (Categories)" icon
• Create new tags by clicking the "» New Tag" hyperlink at the bottom of the list of tags.

(D) Create the groups

Remember Smart Groups! When deciding on what groups you want to create, remember CiviCRM provides both regular and smart groups. A regular group is just a list of contacts. A smart group is based on a saved search like all contacts whose home address is in California. As the information in your database changes (e.g. people move out of California), the membership of your smart group changes

Deciding when to Create Groups You can create regular groups before, during or after your import of contacts. If you plan on creating smart groups, do that after you import your contacts. Before: Create empty groups. At a latter time you can either populate the groups via the import (one import file per group), or by searching the contacts in the database and adding contacts (in a batch) to an existing group. During: For each import file, you can create a single new group that all contacts in that import file become a member of. After: Create empty groups. Search for contacts to add to the empty groups. The key issue here is whether the criteria for being a member of the groups is in the imported data. If yes, you can easily search and batch-add contacts to a group. If no, you should define group membership during the import process.

(E) Make sure your users know what the data standards are for the database.

Users should understand when to use relationships, tags and groups for your specific database. Otherwise identical information can be coded in different ways, defeating the primary purpose of a database: to organize CRM information in an structured fashion.

Other references

Administration Guide:
http://objectledge.org/confluence/display/CRM/Configure+Tags
http://objectledge.org/confluence/display/CRM/Create+and+Manage+Groups
http://objectledge.org/confluence/display/CRM/Configure+Relationship+Types

OpenNGO community contributions:
http://objectledge.org/confluence/display/CRM/Organizing+Your+Data

Return to Quickstart Guide