Is there a limit to how many activity types we should create?

Question

We use Schedule Reminders to set up email series for a very wide range of interest groups. With conditional funnels using smart groups, like Mailchimp conditional campaigns.

The easiest way to initiate these Schedule Reminders is from activity types, but we've hesitated to make an activity type for every new event or campaign since we'd soon have many hundreds. Instead we make activity types that cover generic topics and then use groups to limit which people will receive schedule reminders. It's a bit of a dangerous method - if you forget to limit a schedule reminder to a group you could send out emails to many people who haven't asked for them!

So... would there actually be any impact in terms of performance if we were to have many hundreds - perhaps eventually a thousand or more - activity types?

Thanks for your thoughts!

Answer 1

Although I am not sure what the exact impact on performance would be, it does not sound as a good idea. An activity can already be linked to a campaign, to make specific types for each campaign or event sounds like a bit of a nightmare.

Have you considered using the CiviRules extension (https://civicrm.org/extensions/civirules and documentation on https://docs.civicrm.org/civirules/en/latest/) for sending these emails? I reckon that might make life a little easier than creating hundreds of activity types, specific for each campaing or event.