Contact types
Contact Types are a way to organise the contacts in your CiviPlus site into various categories. They are particularly useful when you need to collect and display different sets of custom data for different types of contacts. For example, you may want to store dietary requirements for a person, but it wouldn’t make sense to record this information for a company. Because you can differentiate between an individual contact and an organisational contact this is easy to set up.
CiviPlus comes with a set of three built-in contact types. These are:
Individual - People
Organisation - Companies or other non-profit organisations
Household - Typically families that share a physical location
Note: You cannot disable or delete these build-in contact types, but you can edit them if you need to.
As part of your standard CiviPlus configuration we have also included an example of a custom Contact Type, “Committee”, which is used to create individually named Committees to which people can be added using the relationship feature (covered in below). The
Configuring a new Contact Type
If you want to create your own custom Contact Types it’s really easy - just follow the steps below:
From the CiviPlus top menu navigate to: Administer → Customise Data and Screens → Contact Types.
This opens up a new page listing the existing Contact Types (built in and custom). Click on the ADD CONTACT TYPE button to create a new one.
In the window that opens up, enter the Name for the new Contact Type, and select the Basic Contact Type. For example, if you are adding “Volunteer” as a new Contact Type you would choose “Individual” as the Basic Contact Type, whereas if you were create a contact type called “Branch” you would use “Organisation” as the base type.
Next you can choose an icon for the new Contact Type from a list of available images by clicking on the Icon field. You can also optionally add a Description, and finally you can decide whether you want the new Contact Type to be Enabled once created. When you are happy with your new Contact Type click ✓ Save and you will return to the list of Contact Types, with your new one added.
You can now use your new Contact Type when creating a new contact, searching for existing contacts, or anywhere where you want to handle different contact in different ways based on their type.