Hello, what's the way to differentiate contacts (donors, volunteers, beneficiaries, etc.) in NPSP ? Through specific object or record type ?
As @Ryan Beaver has suggested - try to keep track of these types of contacts through the standard Salesforce NPSP functionality as much as possible. So to track donors, they will have Opportunities created with a Donation record type and that will be associated with them as a contact and their Account (normally a Household in NPSP)
I would think very carefully about creating new record types. Only create separate record types if you need very different page layouts / processes for each type of contact - and as others have said, record types are designed to be mutually exclusive so they are not ideal for overlapping things like volunteers/donors etc.. Record Types also create upkeep work in the system - e.g. if you add a contact field then you'll need to add it to each page layout you have (normally one page layout is associated with one record type). Dynamic Forms mean you can make page layout adjustments without record type so if at all possible keep your number of page layouts small.
If you don't find that the standard NPSP functionality is giving you the flexibility you need then a simple custom picklist field or checkbox added to the contact record is a good idea (note: don't choose a multi-select picklist as these are hard to work with for reporting and filtering). Let's say you haven't imported the details of previous donations but want to flag a record as having historically been a donor you could add "Donor Prior to Feb 2022" (checkbox). Try to think of names or definitions that won't conflict with the way you'll use Salesforce going forward - as @Ryan Beaver says, it's really easy for things to get out of sync if you have more than one way of defining the same thing.
For beneficiaries, you could have multiple custom picklist fields on the Contact object, e.g. Beneficiary Support type A (picklist XYZ) etc. Or the Program Management Module is designed to allow you to track your programs and is ideal if you're working with beneficiaries. Check it out in a sandbox first though and try setting up your programs - you might find it's more functionality than you'll need and you're happy creating a custom field on the contact object instead.
Good luck with it,
Mary
