Contact vs. Other Relationship

Dina Sorrentino:

I am trying to clean up our organization records with contacts.  I have cleaned up my contact table and I am working on definitions and hiercarchy for each contact.  I will be looking at attributes as well. Currently there are relationships that are marked as contacts of an organization when they are mearly just an employee.  I want to be able to explain the reason's why you would mark someone as a contact vs. adding them just as a relationship and I am curious to see how other RE users handle this. Can anyone share how they handle coding someone as a contact vs. just a relationship?

A Contact is just another type of Relationship, like a spouse or child or Board Member.  The way this is designed to be utilized is this:  the contact person is a relationship.  The Relationship and Reciprocal fields should be Employer and Employee, if you know their Title it should go in the Position field.  And then at the bottom area, under the check boxes for Employee and Primary Employ Info (which should be checked!) there is a Contact Type and a dropdown for Contact Type.  This is where you should be labeling your contacts for an org. 


Now some Orgs use Golf Contact, Gala Contact, Grant Contact. Auction Contact and the like.  And others use Primary Contact, Secondary Contact and Other, with maybe one or two of the others like Grant or Event in there also.  Personally I find that the Primary, Secondary etc. works better and is less confusing for those that are not in RE everyday doing the heavy lifting as far as lists and queries and reports and all that.


Have fun!