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The following are already defined in CiviCRM for your use:

Hopefully, one of these or a combination of them will meet your needs. But, how do you know which to use? The following table summarises the differences:

Tags Groups Relationships
Timed – can become active or inactive based on dates No No Yes
Smart – can include or exclude contacts No Yes No
Mailout – can do mailout from CiviMail No Yes No

A key difference between the hierarchic set of Tags and the hierarchic set of Groups is that a Group that has other Groups beneath it in the hierarchy inherits the contacts from all of those Groups, whereas every Tag is independent even if they are arranged into a hierarchy.

Both our Tags and Groups are arranged into hierarchies as a method of classifying them. Groups are arranged into a hierarchy as a method of aggregating them.

But, arranging the Groups into a hierarchy has caused huge performance issues so that they have been rearranged into a pseudo hierarchy by the use of “::” between each hierarchic element and flattening the actual hierarchy.

It is expected that only an Administrator would alter these hierarchic arrangements.

The actual content of Tags and Groups will change dynamically and the hierarchies may be re-arranged or extended. Thus, no samples are provided in this page – click through to the live data to see what is currently implemented.

Relationships have the property that they have both a start date and an end date. Either of these dates can be null. Thus, the system can deduce whether the relationship is active or inactive today – which will support contacts joining and leaving smart groups automatically at midnight each day.

A very common structure is to use a smart group that selects active relationships of a given type (e.g. the current COTA Victoria staff are those with an active employment relationship with the COTA Victoria organisation). Such a smart group may then be used for bulk mailouts from CiviMail.

Another very common structure is to use a smart group that selects all contacts that have a particular tag. Such a smart group may then be used for bulk mailouts from CiviMail.

Another very common structure is to have one smart group that selects the members of other smart groups or non-smart groups in order to then be used for bulk mailouts from CiviMail. Those included groups would probably not be mailout groups.