Basic Terminology

Terminology

To help you get started, here are a few terms that have special meaning in CiviCRM. There is a more extensive Glossary.

• There are three types of contacts - Individual, Organization, Household.

• Activities provide a way to record and track interactions with contacts, such as Meeting, Phone Call, or Email.

• You can define types of relationships. For example, with an employee-employer relationship, one contact is the employee and another contact (often an Organization) is the employer.

• An access control list specifies who is allowed to access information and what operations they are allowed to perform on it.

• A role defines a group of users who have certain privileges, such as "staff." Users assigned to a role are granted those permissions assigned to the role. Administrators can create as many roles as needed and users can be assigned to one or more roles.

• Tags are used to categorize Individuals, Organizations, and/or Household contacts.

• CiviCRM has two types of groups:
  • "Groups" are used to organize people, for example, Board of Directors. Groups have a fixed membership.
  • "Smart group" membership is based on search criteria. When you add new contacts (or delete contacts) which match the criteria, they are automatically included in (deleted from) the smart group.

• A profile is a System Administrator-defined collection of fields. Besides their use as input forms, CiviCRM profiles allow you to combine groups of fields as contact display pages and search/listings pages.

• CiviCRM provides a Contact Dashboard that allows constituents to display their contributions, group subscriptions, memberships and event registrations.