Contacts

Simply put, a contact is any entity you interact with. It may be people, businesses, government institutions, households, organization chapters, regional districts, or anyone else you are collecting data for in your system.

Individuals, organizations, and households

Since all contact entities are not the same and the nature of how you interact with them will be different from one to the other, CiviCRM segments contacts into three main types, with the option of further segmenting them into subtypes:

• Individual contacts: These contacts represent people. As you work with the contact record, you will record things like first name, last name, date of birth, gender, and other types of data that is relevant only for interaction with people. In addition, individuals are the only contact type that may have a corresponding user account within your Joomla! or Drupal website; after all, "businesses" don't log in to websites, people who work for the business do. CiviCRM provides tools to allow...