Activities are a key concept in CiviPlus, providing a unified place to record and view the history of interactions between your organisation and your contacts, whether they be individuals or organisations. You can use Activities to track meetings, phone calls and other Activities Types that you might have created. Activities are also used by all of CiviCRM's components to record things like when contributions are made, when people come to events, sign petitions, etc.

All Activities happen at a specific point in time. All Activities involve at least one contact, and many involve more than one. Activities can be assigned to staff or other contacts, and an email is automatically sent to the assignee.

If it is important for you to know who at your organisation carried out a task, then record it as an Activity.

You can record an Activity between a given contact and multiple other contacts by adding as many contacts as you like in the With Contact field on the Add Activity form.

CiviPlus comes with dozens of different Activity Types included out of the box, including Meeting, Phone Call and email, but you can create your own Activity Types to define specific things that your organisation does.

CiviPlus has a set of default activity types, however you can also create your own custom types. To do this,

1. Navigate to Administer → Customise Data and Screens → Activity Types

2. You will see a list of existing Activity Types (it’s a long list!). Click on ADD ACTIVITY TYPE to create a new one.

3. Now fill in the New Activity Type Option page that gets shown. The example below is using an Applicant Review Activity Type as a scenario:

4. Label - this is what the Activity Type will be known as, and the user will see when they choose from the list of activities to create

5. Description - this shown at the top of the activity edit and view pages.

6. Activity Category - here you can specify what kind of activity this is, for example Task, Communication, Milestone, Alert etc. For this example we will choose “Applicant Review”.

7. Use the Order field to determine where in the list of available activities this one will appear.

8. If you click the Icon field you can choose from a list of available icons to be displayed against this Activity Type.

9. You can decide whether this new Activity Type can be created for Contacts and Cases, or Cases only. Use the Component field to specify this. In our example we’ve selected “Cases Only” because the Review activity is only relevant when attached to a Grant Application Case.

10. And lastly, you can specify whether this new Case Type is Enabled (active) or not.

Click ✔ SAVE to save this new Activity Type to the list.
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One of the most useful things you can do with an Activity Type is to create a set of custom fields that are specific to this activity so that they can be stored against the activity when it is created/amended.

When you create a custom Field Set you can specify one or more activities that these fields apply to, and they will then appear underneath the standard activity information (added by, contacts involved, dates, status etc).

So for the example above, we might create a Field Set called Applicant Review Scoring Fields with, and then link this to the Grant Application Review Activity Type we created earlier

Once you have added some custom fields to this Field Set you can create an activity of this type - in this example we are doing it from the Case itself, selecting Add Activity and then the Activity Type of “Grant Application Review” we created earlier:

and you will see that within the new Activity the custom fields are available for you to complete: