I am way over my head helping charities and need some probably simple help

I started a web presence for charity to create visibility for professional athlete charitable events by Michigan alumni. This was easy when we just had a few. Now we have many and the concept is going to numerous additional schools.

I am reasonably competent in Joomla, but somewhat new to community builder.

I am thus struggling with implementing the following:

We need to have 3 different kinds of "joiners" to our network - 1 people, 2 what I will call groups - one thing we have done is created a directory for on-line FB and LI groups related to Michigan, I want them in the data so I don't have to keep putting them in and they can be sorted. 3. The charity itself (i.e. Coaches vs. Cancer as an entity instead of a person)

Is there a better way to do this than simply group it all on the contact info part?

The second issue is sorting and how it appears on the website. My helper thinks you can only do 1 sort, I find that hard to believe. Why I desire is to have a player page that can sort by name, sport player, current career; a charity page that can be sorted by charity cause, name of charity, physical location, and event, an event page that sorts by type of event (golf, softball, banquet, whatever), the geographic location and more.

any help on this forum would be great. What would be even greater is if some of you out there are US D-1 school grads who have an interest in rolling this concept out nationwide. It is all volunteer and I have personally paid all the costs. The network will never be commercialized. Instead it is for the alumni to help create visibility for charity and to help find each other and interesting groups on line. If you are interested in helping with this effort (and for any D-1 school grad it is huge visibility for you because I already have the player and coaches network for national reach), please either send me a tweet at @Mike_Keliher (need the _ look for the one with 130K followers) or Link in with Me - Mike Keliher Innovator and Altruist. Thanks much for any help anyone can provide. These networks raise thousands of dollars for events by making sure people know about them. We take no money, we just are happy to help!

We need to have 3 different kinds of "joiners" to our network - 1 people, 2 what I will call groups - one thing we have done is created a directory for on-line FB and LI groups related to Michigan, I want them in the data so I don't have to keep putting them in and they can be sorted. 3. The charity itself (i.e. Coaches vs. Cancer as an entity instead of a person)

Is there a better way to do this than simply group it all on the contact info part?

You want your users organized in groups? Well you've a few options for this. You can use GroupJive to help organize this using user create or admin create groups for them to interact. The alternative is you could use Joomla usergroups, which could be used for Userlist sorting capabilities. If you just need a directory of users organized by state then I recommend using a simple CB select field with the states then have your userlist searchable by that field and it'll be easy to filter it down to a state by state usage.

I'd need to know more about what you're trying to do to really suggest anything further, but see if any of those ideas fit what you have in mind.

The second issue is sorting and how it appears on the website. My helper thinks you can only do 1 sort, I find that hard to believe. Why I desire is to have a player page that can sort by name, sport player, current career; a charity page that can be sorted by charity cause, name of charity, physical location, and event, an event page that sorts by type of event (golf, softball, banquet, whatever), the geographic location and more.

That's exactly the purpose of userlists. It lets you search users based off field criteria. I recommend reading your documentation, which you can download from the Advanced downloads section, regarding list usage. You can begin creating userlists within CB > List Management. Assuming you have all the fields for that information there should be no reason you can't have it on a list and searchable.