How should I track organizations with multiple contacts?
The best way to record this is:
- Create a contact record for the organization itself, with no particular individual’s name in it. Give this contact record a gender of "Organization."
- Create a contact record for each of the people associated with the organization. Then enter relations that relate the individuals to the organization. You may want to use relations that provide useful information. For example, if the organization is a school, you might want three or four relation types like “is teacher at/has teacher”, “is primary contact for/has primary contact”, “is principal at/has principal”, “is billing contact at/has billing contact”. Since relations can be searched, you will then be able to do a search like “Find all people who are principals at a school”.
The advantage to this approach is that it does not mix up an organization and individuals within one contact record (is this phone number for the person or the organization?). It also defines the organization independently of any individuals that work there.
Some Sumac users prefer to just have one record for the organization, without adding the employees as contacts as well. This is acceptable, but has the following limitations:
- As your relationship with that organization grows and you start engaging with several employees, this option limits your ability to record unique interactions with each individual employee.
- If the organization has turnover on their staff, it becomes difficult to see the history of who you have interacted with in the past, vs. which employee you're interacting with presently.
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