How to keep track of our constituents' nominations/awards

Question

We're trying to setup Civi in our organization and one of the things we keep track of is the awards our members get and their nomination to said award.

Each award has a name, description, set of requirements, deadline (usually annually), contact, and whether it is still active or inactive.

In the current setup (using access db), there's a separate table with the list of all the awards (~400) and it's unique id is referenced in the contact's information, along with the nomination date and whether contact received or not. Multiple members could also be nominated or win the same award.

I was thinking that in Civi, we could have a custom field set for individuals with the award name, date of nomination, and whether awarded or not. I think this is easy enough to implement. Another thing we thought of is to have a custom activity type with custom fields associated to it.

However, we'd like to have all the possible awards also available for reference and for lookup so the users don't have to type manually the award name--which is a common source of mistake and spelling errors.

Also, some awards are given by an organization and an organization could potentially give multiple awards. That's why the list is very long.

Is there a better way to do this in Civi?

Sorry if the description is confusing, but i tried to describe it as best I can.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You could use/abuse a new Contact Sub-Type based on Organisation for your awards and use one or more Relationship Type to indicate who got nominated/awarded award with the dates. Or you could use a Contact Reference field rather than a relationship (but you don't get the dates option then).

Answer 2

Pete's idea is a pretty good one. If you have access to a coder, you could also make an "Award" entity - but that's a LOT more work.