Our usual rule is to enter constituency codes and upload activities (for example) to a HH record as opposed to the individual affiliate. When an Individual is affiliated with an organization and also has a HH, I am wrestling with the pros and cons of staying with the HH rule. In these cases, the reason the Individual is being invited to the activity is due to the fact he or she is affiliated with the Org record. So in that light,I would choose the Individual record over the HH. However, since almost all data is residing in the HH, I am concerned about being inconsistent and how that may effect my database in the future.
Please let me know if any one has any recommendations on this one. Thanks!
Lise at Roundabout
We put certain constituencies on the household (those having to do with donations and ticketing, because we keep transactions on the household) and certain constituencies on the individual record (board membership, certain support group memberships, volunteer activity recognition). It requires some training to pull lists and set up extractions—you need to know exactly what you are pulling and why. So for mailings where board membership is salient, we pull the board members but then replace them with their household if it’s a social mailing and pull them as individuals if it’s an e-mailing or an invitation to a board event.
Lucie
______________________________Lucie SpielerIT Development and Training ManagerFLORIDA GRAND opera
We don't have any affected constituencies, but our Institutional team strongly prefers activities for organizational contacts to go on the organization's record itself.
This means that an Activity list will never have the invited Individual; it will read "So and So Foundation" and we will put the invited contact in the notes.
This makes it easy to keep an activity history in one place as contacts change, but it requires treating organization contacts much differently from individual donors.
-- Mike
We have a hybrid approach for specifically for this transition and have two constituency codes for these instances (of which we only have a few). An example is board ... we are still currently processing transactions to the household so we put a BD constituency on the household; however, we also want to be able to populate lists that specifically include only the member, which we do with a BDI (board individual) constituency. These are actually managed by a membership level that cues the constituency to be added so that we can track term dates, but it could be done without the membership. We opted for this route instead of using relationships to manage the, well, relationship.
As for activities and events, usually we populate the information in the individuals record if the invite is to a single person, and to the household if it is a joint invite. For instance: the wife is invited to a lady's lunch - activity goes in her record; the couple is invited to a gala - activity goes in household record; the husband is invited to an event due to his affiliation to his company - depends ... if he is our primary contact with the organization, it's likely it will go in his record; otherwise, if he is just a "guest" of a company's table purchase, the data will be entered in the organization's record.
Thus far we have found this approach extremely helpful and informative with constituencies, and haven't really noticed any negative impact with the activity data.
Best of luck!
_______________________________________________________
Amber Newsome
Manager of Special CampaignsSegerstrom Center for the Arts
600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, CA 92626
T (714) 556-2122 x 4259 F (714) 755-2712E ANewsome@SCFTA.org