Link individual contacts to households or organizations for communications purposes

lobo asked me to write up something about this a while back; hopefully, it's still useful.

There are some situations in which many individual contacts will be linked to the same organization or household, and all communications with them will use the address and contact info of the organization or household. Rather than entering the organization/household contact info again and again for each individual contact, it would be great to be able to tell CiviCRM to use the contact info for an organization or household with which the individual contact has a relationship.

One way to do this would be to provide options like "Use organization address and contact info for this individual" or "Use household address and contact info for this individual." It might even be better to be able to designate which info you want to pull from the organizational/household record and which info you want to use from the individual's record itself. Another way to do that might be to default to the organizational/household info except for information that the user has entered for the individual record. So, let's say an individual is linked to a household record, and their record indicates that CiviCRM should pull address and contact info from that household record, but they have a different phone number from the rest of the household. CiviCRM should then know to pull all contact info except for the phone number from the household record. Then, when the user views that individual's Contact Summary or exports that individual's info, the address and other contact info displayed is that of the household record, but the phone number from the individual record is preserved.