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. 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, from search results select Edit from the drop down to the right, or from View Contact select Edit in the lower right).

   

   

   

   

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

   

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

   

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

    

11. 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.