best way to group people in households?

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ahillio's picture
Posted by ahillio on February 15, 2014 at 2:07am

A primary need we have for this household data is for snail mail. When sending mail we only send one piece per household, and the mail needs to be addressed properly (for when married couples have different last names etc). Additionally households are useful for kids in foster homes and when parents are divorced.

I've had different ideas about grouping people in households:

  1. redhen organization type of household (with a relation to connect contacts to it)
  2. household vocabulary and term reference field on contact
  3. no actual 'thing' for the household, and simply using relations to connect contacts, and putting an address field on contacts

1 seems like the obvious solution now, but I wonder if I'm missing something. Maybe, for example, there would be an advantage to creating a new type of entity for households?

Any one has insight on this? It sorta feels like a dumb question to ask, but I guess I'm questioning this thinking of the way CiviCRM has households separate from organizations. Thoughts?