Individuals and Organizations - Add Contact Type

Individuals and Organizations - Add Contact Type

1. This tutorial will cover how to add a contact type to a contact record.
2. Contact Types are categories of contacts that have an important commonality that you wish to track within the system and may have additional information derived from that commonality. Another way of thinking of contact types is as a way to define a contact's relationship to your organization (they are a board member  of your organization, a volunteer of your organization, a donor to your organization, etc.).
3. Contrast Contact Types with Contact Tags, which are keywords you can add to records. Contact Tags generally indicate a temporary status and/or a relationship to an entity other than your organization. For example, a contact type of "student" would indicate that a contact is a student at/taking classes at your organization. A contact tag of "student" would indicate that the contact is a student in general/a student somewhere.
4. Contact Types can be used to search for/filter contacts in Advanced Search and in Reports. In addition, they can be tied to custom data so that the specified data set fields will only appear on the records of contacts with that contact type (for example, you might want to track details of pet ownership including pet name, age, and species. You might tie that pet details custom data set to a contact type "Pet Owner" so that the pet related fields will only show on relevant records/the records of people with the contact type "Pet Owner."
5. There are three types of Contact Types, see tutorials on this link: Configure Contact Types to see the different type of contact types and how to customize/configure contact types.
6. Users can only add system manual and user-defined contact types to a contact record. You cannot manually add any of the system automatic contact types to a record (only the system can add those contact types to records).
7. Please Note: the Member and Donor contact types will still show on a contact record (if previously assigned to that contact) even if you have the Membership and/or Fundraising modules turned off.
8. To add a contact type to a contact record, edit the contact record (from Direct Search, click the blue arrow and then select Edit Details OR from search results select Edit from the drop down to the right OR from View Contact select Edit in the lower right).

   

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9. Click on the plus (+) icon next to the word contact type in the upper left to add a contact type.

   

10. Check the box next to the contact type(s) you wish to add to the contact record and click on continue button.

    

11. Click on the Save button to save the changes.

    

12. You can also add/update contact types to multiple records at once using the Take Action Menu found at the bottom of the search results screen (see our tutorial on using the Take Action Menu/Bulk Updates). Contact Types can also be assigned to contact records en mass as part of an import.
13. You can only remove contact types from a contact if the contact type is manually added by a user. The system default contact types that is automatically added by the system can only be removed if user reverts the action done to add the contact types (for example: a Donor - all donations must be deleted for the contact type to be removed from the contact record). If the contact type you want to remove is a system default that you manually added or the contact types you configured, you can remove the contact type from the same screens/places where you can add contact types (in the take action menu at the bottom of the search results screen, from the blue arrow in the direct search screen, and/or from edit contact).
    1. • To remove the contact type though advanced search, search for the contact(s) that you want to remove a contact type from and select them from the search result.

         

       • At the bottom right, click on Apply to Selected or All Search Result. Select the Remove Contact Type(s) action.

         

    • If you are removing the contact type from the contact record, you need to edit the contact, click the (+)  plus sign in the Contact Types section, and uncheck the contact types you want to remove from the pop up window. The grayed our contact types are those contact types you cant remove/automatically applied by the system.

      

      

14. NOTE: If a contact type is associated with a Custom Data Set and has data in it, you won't be able to remove the contact type as doing so will remove the custom data set from the contact's record. To remove the contact type, you must first edit the contact, go to the custom data set, and clear/delete the data in that custom data set. Click Save to save the changes. After which, you should be able to remove the contact type from the contact's record.