Creating new activities

Activities are fundamental to how CiviCRM works. They are a record of all interactions between your organization and your contacts. CiviCRM comes with a ready-made set of activity types, such as phone calls, meetings, and e-mails, that can be used in most circumstances.

You can add your own activity types to suit your organization's needs. For example, yours may be an organization that performs background checks on volunteers before they are allowed to work with its clients. You could create an activity type called Background Check that would help you manage this process.

How to do it…

You should consider what activity types you need as part of the planning stage of your CiviCRM deployment. Adding a new activity type in CiviCRM is easy.

1. Navigate to Administer | Customize Data and Screens | Activity Types. Click on the Add activity type button. In the Label field, enter your activity. In this case we will use Background Check.
2. In the Component field, we can choose to have the new activity set against Contacts.
3. Save the new activity type.
   

How it works…

Test your new activity type by going to a contact and clicking on the Actions button present at the top left of the contact screen. This will show a drop-down list of available actions. Activities are listed in the first column.

See also

• The Adding custom fields recipe in this chapter
• You can find further details about CiviCRM Activities at http://book.civicrm.org/user/current/organising-your-data/activities/