Contacts and their Data

This section assumes that you are familiar with the basic concepts relating to CRM software and have spent time evaluating your organizations needs and your existing data. You will need to have access to a CiviCRM site, either your own site, or one of the public demo sites.

CiviCRM enables you to store and access information about people and organizations. You can store information about staff, volunteers, funders, clients, coalition partners, members, donors or anyone else that is useful to you.

There are three distinct contact types defined in the software:

• Individual - any person you have dealings with.
• Organization - this could be another non-profit, a company, a chapter of your organization, or even a committee.
• Household - a family or group of people who share a physical location.

CiviCRM provides different fields for each type of record. For example, gender only applies to individuals, not organizations or households. You can also define additional data that you want to collect and apply it to only one type.  You could choose to create a custom data field to record the Chairperson or CEO's name and only apply this field to organizations.

The Contact Screen

The best way to get to grips with contact management is to have a look around the various screens that are used to store and display information about contacts.

You can find a contact from the CiviCRM home page by entering part of their name or e-mail address in the quick search box. Or leave it blank and hit the Search button to find all the contacts in your database.

Contact Tabs

Across the top of all contact records are a series of tabs. These will give you access to all of that contact's information. We are going to cover the contact summary tab here in some depth, and then look at the other tabs.

If you think that some of the tabs are not useful and will not be used in your deployment, you can make changes (disable or enable chosen tabs) from Administer CivCRM » Global Settings » Site Preferences. If you don't see some of the tabs described below, you might need to enable them.

Tabs are also dependent on the components which are enabled in your installation. For example, the Contributions tab will be hidden if the CiviContribute component is disabled.

Summary Tab

The summary tab gives you an overview of information about your contact. Here you will find names, addresses and contact details. The information on this page appears fairly straightforward, but take a closer look and you will find some pretty clever stuff is going on. 

You will notice that there are also four buttons on this screen. If you wish to change any information about this contact, you can go to the editing screen by clicking the Edit button. There is also a button to Delete the contact. If you with to print out the contact's details choose the Print button to take you to a print-friendly view of this contact's information. The last button, the vCard button, will bring the contact's details into your email client (you shouldn't do this if you want your emails to this person to be recorded in CiviCRM).

There are also a range of actions you can take from this screen:

• You can send an e-mail to given contact. The email will go to the address that is set up as their preferred e-mail address and will be recorded as an activity. You will be able to see this activity on their Activities Tab.
  
• If 'Map this Address' is showing above the address, you can bring up a map (either using Google Maps or Yahoo Maps, depending on your system's configuration) showing you where this person lives. If it doesn't show on your screen, this feature hasn't yet been configured for your site. You can add map support from Administer CiviCRM » Global Settings » Mapping and Geocoding.
  

CiviCRM includes a complete set of fields "out-of-the-box" to store basic contact information. They are usually referred to as built-in fields. They include:

• Name fields
• Job title and employer
• Phone numbers, email address(es) and instant messenger screen names
• One or more mailing addresses
• Basic demographics (gender and birthdate) 

Note one small but significant feature of the summary screen. In the screenshot below there is a little box with a minus sign in it, next to the "Home (primary location)" text, as well as the "Communication Preferences" text.

 

This '-' (minus) sign icon indicates that the section is 'expanded'. Now take a look at next screenshot:

 

Now the box contains "+" (plus) sign, and you cannot see the "Communication Preferences" fields. This means that the section is "collapsed". Sometimes specific sections will be collapsed by default, and you will have to click the "+" sign to see the fields. This happens for example when a contact has more than one location entered. The first one is shown by default, the rest of them will be collapsed.

The Summary screen also contains a link to the » Contact Dashboard. This screen allows users to view and modify their own group subscriptions, and see the history of their own contributions, memberships and event registrations.

If you're using CiviCRM in conjunction with Drupal or Joomla, you may also see a link to » View User Record. This link is shown when the contact is a registered User of your site. It links to a CMS-specific User Account screen.

Name Fields

Each contact's name can include the following fields: Prefix, First, Middle and Last Names, Suffix and Nickname. You don't have to use all of them, but they are available in case you want to store all of this information.

If you wish to record a prefix such as "Mr", "Ms" or "Dr" for your contact you can do so using the dropdown box on the edit screen. If there are other prefixes you need to use such as "Sir" or "Father", you can add these to the dropdown list in Administer CiviCRM » Option Lists » Individual Prefixes (Ms, Mr...). The same applies to name suffixes.

Locations

A location is a group of address related fields consisting of phone, email and postal address field groups. 

CiviCRM can hold more than one location for a contact. For example, a person may have a home address, a billing address and a work address and we need to record these in separate locations. One of these locations will be marked as "Primary". It will be used for any postal mailings that you do. You can explicitly choose which location will be primary for a particular person, or let it default to the first one entered. If a person pays you by credit card the details used for credit card payments will be stored in the Billing location for the contact. You can specify the maximum number of locations a contact may have from Administer CiviCRM » Global Settings » Address Settings. The default for this setting is 1. You will need to modify it if you plan on recording multiple addresses for some contacts.

You can also store multiple phone numbers and email addresses for each location. One of these email addresses can be explicitly marked as the address which receives all bulk mailings (e.g. emails your organization sends using the CiviMail component).

Relationships Tab

Relationships are basically "connections" between contact records in your database. Each such connection can be named to describe the nature of the connection. Let's say you have two contact records: one for a person - Richard Richardson, and the second one for an organization - let's call it ABC Association. Richard is an employee of ABC, and you want to store this information in the database. You do this by creating a relationship between Richard and his employer. Once you do this, you will be able to see this connection from both Richard's and ABC Association's records. Here is Richard's Relationships tab.

Actually, the Employee / Employer relationship is a special one. If you look at the Summary tab again you can see that the Current Employer field shows the name "ABC Association". This name is actually a link. If you click on it you will go to the "ABC Association" contact record. Entering in an Employer in this field is a shortcut way to define an employment relationship. Whenever you fill in the Current Employer field a record with a matching name will be looked up and the appropriate relationship will be created. If no record for this organization exists one will be added before creating the relationship.

Another special type of relationship is used for connecting individuals with households. Again, on the Contact Summary tab you can see the text "Household address" and a link to "Richardson Household". This is displayed because instead of filling in Richard's location with address information we decided to use his household address. This creates the Household Member relationship between Richard and his household.

Apart from those two special relationship types, you can create and register any other type of relationship. The Relationships tab shows all of a contact's existing relationships with other contacts (individuals, households or organizations in the database). If you want to create a new type of relationship, go to Administer CiviCRM » Option Lists » Relationship Types.

Additional powerful characteristics of relationships include the ability to set a start and end date, or disable them manually if they are not valid anymore. This means, that you can store the history of relationships in your contact records. The screenshot below shows a marriage that has ended. Other uses include showing children who are no longer considered to have a 'dependent child' relationship based on reaching their 18th birthday, or changes in employment relationships.

Relationships can be also extended with custom fields if you need to store additional information for them.

Activities Tab

The Activities tab does two things.  First, it displays all your interactions with the contact over time. This includes all CiviCRM's inbuilt activities like event attendance, contributions, membership sign-up and renewal, phone calls, emails and user-defined activities.  Second, it allows you to record activities with contacts.  Clicking on the icons at the top of the screen (Send an Email, Meeting, Phone call) will bring up a screen where you can enter those details.  This tab can also be used to record any custom activities that you've defined for your CiviCRM installation from Administer CiviCRM » Option Lists » Activity Types. The ability to define custom activity types, and extend them with custom fields provides a powerful tool for tracking a wide variety of organization activities. You could choose to track activities such as press releases, press conferences, site visits or voluntary work.

Activities are a great way to store interactions that happen at a specific time, or that link specific people.  If it is important for you to know who at your organisation carried out a task, record it as an activity.   Another advantage of activities is that they record when something has happened, which is useful if you need to report on the volume of activities performed during a specific time period.

Activities are either set as completed, or scheduled.  Scheduled activities that are overdue appear in red in the Activities tab.

Contributions Tab

The Contribution Tab shows any financial contributions made by the contact whose details you are viewing. In the example below, the first contribution was created when a membership fee was paid while the second was created when a person signed up for an event. The status is set to pending (incomplete transaction) because their payment has yet to be received. When the payment is received you can click on 'Edit' to change the status to Completed (you can also choose to send an email receipt).

 

Memberships Tab

This tab displays the memberships a contact has signed up for. In this case, the contact signed up to be a General member on May 8th, 2009. 

 

Events Tab

The Events Tab displays event registrations for this contact. Note that the related payment showed up on the Contributions Tab (above image) in the top row.

 

Groups Tab

The Groups Tab shows the groups that the contact is a member of. Groups can be used for several reasons including mailing lists and permissioning (ACLs). Note that the group that displays "Added (by Web)" is the one the contact has added themselves to (e.g. from the Contact Dashboard or some other web form). On the other hand, an administrator or staff member has added them to the "Case Resources" group. Whether users can add themselves to a group is one of the settings configured for a group. When you set a group's visibility to "Public Listings" users can join via Profile forms. You may want to familiarise yourself with the discussion on using Profiles for mailing list sign-ups covered in a later section.  Also note that you can see a history of groups the contact has unsubscribed or been removed from.

Notes Tab

The Notes Tab is a place where you can record random bits of information about a contact. Generally you would use custom fields for information you plan to collect about your contacts, but in some cases it may be useful to record additional, ad-hoc notes about people. Since information stored in notes is unstructured, you should be careful about using the Notes Tab, unless you know that you or other people using your iviCRM implementation will remember to look at that tab. When creating a Note both the subject and the content are free-text fields (i.e. the subject field does not have to be chosen from pre-defined options).

Tags Tab

Tags are one way of categorizing contacts in your database. (Other methods are Custom Data and Groups). You can configure which tags you wish to use for your organization. You can search on tags and create Smart Groups based on them.

 

Change Log Tab

This tab gives limited information about changes made to a contact record. It shows the change date and who made the change, but not what was changed. 

 

The 'First Aid Skills' tab

Many organizations need more information than is provided in the standard contact fields. You can define additional custom fields that are relevant to your organisation such as marital status, education or first aid skills. You can read up elsewhere on how and when to create custom fields but right now we would like to draw your attention to how they appear in a contact's screen. If you are looking at an installation of CiviCRM and you see unfamiliar tabs then chances are they have been created by custom fields.

In the screenshot below case we have created a group of custom fields called "First Aid Skills". When creating the custom data group we selected "Tab" as the display style. This caused the fields to show in a separate tab. If we had selected the other option, "Inline", the fields would have shown up as one of the field groups on the Contact Summary tab.

 

Controlling the Contact Screens

After working with the contact editing and summary screens for a while, you may realise that there are sections and / or fields that aren't useful for your organization. The good news is that you can easily hide some fields and sections. For example, if your organisation doesn't need to store demographics information - you can remove it by configuring Site Preferences:

• Login to CiviCRM using account with Administer CiviCRM privileges,
• Navigate to Administer CiviCRM >> Global Settings >> Site Preferences,
• Un-check the Demographics box under Editing Contacts,
• Hit Save button.
  

Similarly, if you want to remove (or add) fields in the postal address section:

• Navigate to Administer CiviCRM >> Global Settings >> Address Settings
  
• Check or un-check fields under Address Editing
  
• Hit Save button.