How to include individual information within organization record

Question

I admin a CiviCRM 4.6 site running on Joomla 2.5. It's a company-based membership organization, and we're looking for a better way to keep track of prospect activity. Here are a few considerations:

1. We process memberships manually, so all main members are organizations, with individuals receiving the "employee of" membership status.
2. We want to keep track of activities such as phone calls and emails from within the organization record, in case we get a new main point of contact for a particular company, the activity record stays in the same place.
3. We've created a separate category for individuals called "Main Contact" used for reports, so when we pull a list of members, we get the main contact person's information.

With this in mind, is it possible to have particular fields (such as name, title, email, phone, etc.) from the designated "Main Contact" pulled into the organization's record? I've worked with databases that did this, where you entered in the ID number for the main contact into the company record and it pulled in and linked the individual's information. Then, when running a report for members, you can set it to pull just member organizations, but have the person's name and contact info. It would also allow for easier prospect management, by being able to have a record of all activity stay with the company. So a new email from the company profile would go to the "Main Contact."

If this isn't possible, any ideas for a workaround?

Answer 1

Not sure if this is a helpful answer, but do you already know that when you create an Activity eg for a Phone Call, you can mark it as being 'with' both the Organisation and the Individual? Eg I would go to the Individuals record, add the Activity to them and then also find/add their Employer so the Activity record shows on both contacts.

Answer 2

I'm not quite sure if I understand what you are trying to achieve, when you say category, I guess you are referring to a custom field? If so what kind of custom filed?

What you describe is doable although I believe it will require some customization.

The only out-of-the-box way to do it that I can think of would be to use a Contact Reference custom field, which is the very useful auto-complete filed you find along the vast pages of CiviCRM (see custom fields documentation). You could have the Main Contact filed in the Organization's contact summary or in its own Tab, it wont give you the rest of information you are asking for but it will give a shortcut (a link to view the contact) to that particular contact.

Another option would be to create a custom extension to achieve your goal, hook_civicrm_searchColumns in conjunction with a few changes in the appropriate template will do the trick. I have a very similar case to yours, the difference is the Main Contact field is used for the Membership entity, we collect the information when the Membership is created, and we output it in the Membership Tab of the organization, in the Find Membership search result and also in some membership reports.

Hope that clarifies the path to go, let me know if you need more information.

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