How to store emergency contact phones related to a contact without creating new contacts?

Question

We need to store contact phones for a contact, to have a list of people to phone in case of emergency. For example, we have children contacts and we want to store the phones of their parents and grandparents without having to create a CiviCRM contact for each of these phones.

We expect to do this on phone section but seems it's not possible to do so without pervert the expected functionality of these fields.

There is a way to do this? If not, what would be the best way to make it possible? Through an extension? Adding it to core? I imagine a "Note" field on a phone row next to "Phone, ext. Phone location, Phone type" to allow attaching a comment like "mother's phone".

Answer 1

I can see a few options:

• create phone types (or perhaps even location types if it is more than a phone for an emergency) like 'parents phone'. This is what I have done myself for a youth choir

• create a custom data set 'emergency phones' for individuals. If you set it to allow multiple records you can have a group with a label field and a number field

• you could indeed use notes but I would not recommend that as it is unstructured data

• an extension seems like overkill to me in this case

Answer 2

Right now we are collecting this data using the same phone or extension fields. But we understand that it is not the best way and that it can give us problems for example if we want to use a validator of phone numbers.

See the following images as examples: