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In addition to the core built-in fields and contact types CiviCRM gives the users several other ways of collecting data on contacts and using that data to manipulate contacts and  to carry out activities with large sets of contcats.

GROUPS

Firstly Groups are collections of contacts that have something in common. For example, you may create a group for "Board of Directors" that includes all members of your organization's board.

A group in CiviCRM can be either a mailing group, or used to define access rights.

There is no way of defining the type of relation between the group and the member (eg. you can't have diffrent membership types within a group you're either a member of the group or you are not) .

If you need to grant a different access right to your volunteers than to the members of your board, that's likely that you will want to use a group. Likewise, if you want to send mass mailing to them.

Groups are for what you do with the contacts
If the category is defined by the relationship and type of interaction you have with the contact (sending the newsletter, member of the youth committee, media we want to inform about this type of activity...) , we use groups.

Groups tend to evolve over time, and we might create groups that are short lived, eg. volunteers for our project X. Do delete them once they aren't used anymore, otherwise you will have too many quickly.

To make them useful, you should try keeping the numbers of groups "low enough". If you use groups for every category, it will end up as something that is just too complicated too use.

There are two variations of Groups - Regular Groups whic you can think of as static and Smart Groups, which you can think of as dynamic

• Regular Groups
• Smart Groups

TAGS

Tags are little more than labels for contacts they are highly visible , so should be given some thought to when setting up, and also now can be organised in a hierachy.

• More on Tags

CUSTOM FIELDS

if you need to be able to enter a date or a number select from several options or enter variable text then you need to use custom fields as it wouldn't be practical to create tags or groups "1st march, 2nd march .... etc"

Custom data fields can be exposed to let the contacts modify them themselves(eg. via a profile in a registration form).

Custom Fields are a little more difficult to use for categorisation from the end user prspective because they are accesses through Advanced Search rather than the CiviCRM home page. Dashlets could be created to provide access to regularly used searches from CiviCRM home.

• Custom data