Introduction

The Association feature provides the ability to link a single contact to multiple organizations. This feature is required to match real-word situations such as:

A contract is the Executive Director of one organization but a board member at several other organizations.
A contact is a professor at a university and a consultant at a hospital as well as the CEO of a start-up company.
A contact is an individual artist but a collaborator in multiple arts collectives.

The relationship between the contact and the associated organization is control by Role. So when you view a contact you will see all the organizations they are associated with as well as the role at each organization.

Configuring Associations

This feature is accessed through Global Settings - Organizations and Users tab.

The steps for configuring are as follows:

Enable Association feature
Create List Views
Configure Lookup and Assignment Roles for Associates
Configure Lookup Categories for Associations
Enable Date Range for Associations (optional)
Enable Switch Organization feature

Enable Association feature

Associates/Associations – enabling this feature will allow you to associate a single contact with multiple companies. The Associates tab will be displayed in each company record – to show associated people. The Associations tab will be displayed on each contact record to display the companies that they are associated with.

List Views

The List View settings on this page allow System Administrators to define the list views for Associated records on different profiles. See Configuring List Views for instructions.

Lookup Roles

Lookup Roles allows System Administrators to delimit the roles that are returned when Associates are selected. Only those users in the roles selected in Lookup Roles will be selectable from the contacts lookup:

Assignment Roles

The Assignment Roles setting allows System Administrators to delimit the roles with which contacts can be associated with an organization. Only those roles selected in Assignment Roles will be able to be selected from the Role dropdown when associating a contact to an organization.

Association Role

If you select a role in the Association Role setting, whenever you change a contact's company, the contact will be associated with the previous company with the Association Role. This is useful if you have a role called "Previous Affiliations," and want to track the organizations with which a contact has been previously affiliated.

Association Settings