Creating Smart Groups based on multiple relationship types

Question

Our company is made up of 'societies' which we have added as organisations (we have around 370 societies). Each society has anything from 90-800 'members' which we have added as individuals and given the relationship type 'member' to the specific society they belong to.

Each society also has a committee of around 10-15 individuals, these committee members have the relationship type 'member' as well as a committee relationship type of 'society chairman' or 'society treasurer' or 'society events secretary' etc etc. There are around 30 of these committee relationship types.

What we are trying to create are 'committee smart groups'

I can create smart groups based on one relationship type, so:

• Individual
• with Relationship - 'Society Chairman'
• with Target Contact - 'Example Society 1'

But this gives me one individual, what I want to search is:

• Individual
• with Relationship - 'Society Chairman' OR 'Society Treasurer' OR 'Society Events Secretary etc.
• with Target Contact - 'Example Society 1'

I cannot however, seem to be able to select more than one relationship type at a time, meaning my smart group is only based on one relationship type. I can select multiple contact types or activity types, so wonder why relationship types do not have the same functionality. Does anyone have a solution to this?

Answer 1

Probably the easiest way is to create a smart group for each relationship type using advanced search as you've highlighted and then create a 'master' smart group which is anyone who belongs to either child smart group.

The other option would have been to use search builder but at present (v4.6.9) relationships aren't supported yet.