Dissolving Households

Hi

We are in the midst of creating a formal policy to handle the dissolution of households and are wondering how other organizations handle this. Our main questions have to do with the following:

1.      How much information do you need before breaking apart a household?

2.      Which partner retains the donation and ticket history?

a.      A main point of concern for San Francisco Opera is who keeps the subscription seats. Our subscribers can renew into their same seats year after year.

3.      How are you interacting with the partner who does not keep the transactional history? As a new patron? As a long-time patron? How do you track this?

Our thought is to give the transactional history to the patron making the request (with the caveat being if they were just recently added to the account, the partner associated with the account for longer would retain the history) and if we don’t have new contact information for the partner being spun off the account marking that account as do not solicit until we get additional contact information. Is anyone doing anything different? I am particularly interested in hearing if any organizations are not giving anyone the history and starting each partner with a new account.

Thanks
Jess Levy

San Francisco Opera

415-565-3283

Hi Jess,

Did you land on a formal policy for dissolving a household, and would be willing to share what you landed on? I'm trying to tackle this as well.

I'm also curious to hear from anybody what you do when two donors with an active membership divorce. If you split one person off of the household, do you manually create a membership for the person you removed so that he/she also gets donor benefits for the remainder of the membership? I guess that's a policy question as much as it is a database question.

This may be a silly question and answered elsewhere, but how do I remove a spouse from a record as a result of divorce?  As mentioned above, I'm not concerned about what transactions remain on one spouse's record because we have a much stronger relationship generally with the other spouse.  I simply want one's name to be removed from the household (and perhaps become an unaffiliated Individual record).  When trying to delete the record from the relationships tab, I get "An affliation with an A1 value cannot be deleted when there is an existing A2 affiliation (Affiliation/Name Indicator)."  What step am I missing?

Thanks in advance!

For what it's worth, I've been leaving the household account intact and separate, with the person we have a stronger relationship with still on it and the other person affiliated as ex-spouse. We had a couple of donors we knew to have separated, but they later decided to reconcile. (Apparently. We think.) In this case, changing from ex-spouse back to a primary A1/A2 affiliation was pretty easy.

Hello,

We are in a consortium at Segerstrom Center and have a firm policy for how to handle deceased and divorced patrons.  I've uploaded our documentation to My Account page, which you should be able to access via this link:

http://www.tessituranetwork.com/Community/members/amberalbert9442/files/Tessitura-Version-11-Policy-_2D00_-Deceased-Divorced-Patrons-_2D00_-FINAL.pdf.aspx

If not, just go to my profile page and click on the file titled Tessitura Version 11 Policy - Deceased Divorced Patrons - FINAL.

We also have a hard rule that subscription changes must be provided in writing, and that we will not split a subscription between a divorcing couple: the asset may only go to one patron of the dissolved couple.  I know this doesn't work for all organizations, and we do receive complaints from time to time, but we have found it is the best way to protect our organization.

If you have any questions about our policy (how-to and screen shots included in the PDF), please let me know.  Also as a side note, the screen shots are of a faux group of patrons that were created specifically for training purposes so we wouldn't have to mask information between the Tessitura users in the consortium.  You might notice that the family are close friends with a lady named Mary Poppins.  :-)

_______________________________________________________

Amber Newsome

Manager of Special Campaigns
Segerstrom Center for the Arts

600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, CA 92626

T (714) 556-2122 x 4259   F (714) 755-2712
E ANewsome@SCFTA.org

Thanks so much for sharing this, Amber! I've been working on a similar document and this is fantastic to have.