Multiple Contacts per Partner or a way to group Families?

[guitarmanvt]

I'm finding that often there is a different e-mail address for each member in a family. Sometimes, there are even different cell phone numbers.

A couple ideas:

1. Allow multiple "contact information" data per Partner.
2. Allow multiple Partners to be arbitrarily grouped: Families, Small Groups, Churches, etc. (I know the Church grouping already exists.)

Of course, it will become necessary to identify a "Primary Contact". Also, some reports will probably be affected.

Anything like this in the works?

[jmuehleisen]

Well, there is a way to do some of what you want already.

On the "More Info" tab, you can put stuff like "Jim's Cell", "Sue's Cell", etc.

And you can put in different email addresses for people on the "More Info" tab as well. Just put a check mark in the "Send" box so the program knows this is am email.

Now, as to the grouping thing, I'm thinking about that whole thing. I've played around with allowing a totally open ended grouping things ... totally user defined, but just how to pull it off is tough.

[guitarmanvt]

Yeah, I know what you mean.

Would it be possible to have a link to a "parent" record, so that "child" records can be grouped under the parent? This would allow complex tree-like structures to be built. Of course, it would also introduce a ton of complexity to the programming and likely some confusion for users.

Hey, I just tried something. Check it out:

1. I created "Test Church" and checked "Is a church."
2. I then created "Test Group A" and "Test Group B", checked "Is a church" (although not really), and linked them to the "Test Church" (in the Church field).
3. I created "Test Person 1" and "Test Person 2" and linked them to "Test Group A" (in the Church field).
4. Now, "Test Church" and "Test Group A" and "Test Group B" show up in the "Churches List", where I can drill-down (sort-of) to see who's part of what group.

Freaky, eh?

[jmuehleisen]

Another possibility is to create more than one categories using the "church" logic.

One would be "churches" and other category would be for "other groups."

Then, I wouldn't have to re-do any of the logic.

But, what I may do is add another tab to the donor screen called "groups" and you can put people in unlimited numbers of user defined groups.

Some people, for example, find the 10 user definable lists to be not enough. This would replace the 10 user lists with a totally extendable one.

Then, you could filter by "groups" ... see who is in what group, etc.

I've been playing around with it, and the coding is actually fairly straight forward. But, we'll see.