Hi all,
I am admitting defeat. I have poured over the documentation on the new list features. The wizard to add affiliates, etc makes sense and is sheer genius. But I am totally flummoxed on when to use the "Search Household" checkbox. It seems that all my lists run fine without that box checked if I am searching for contribution history or membership data, even though that info may be on household records OR individual records (it will be on the primary household if one exists, or on the individual if no primary household exists).
If you held a gun to my head, I'd say that I think you are supposed to use that box only if you are asking for multiple criteria in the same list where the system might have to check BOTH the household AND the primary individuals to get everyone you want included, so it's more about whether you have to check both levels for each person than whether the data can live on either level for any given person....does any know if I'm on the right track? Anyone found an effective way of explaining this within your organization?
Thanks!
Beth
Hi Beth -
I totally don't have a silver bullet here, and I'm going to do a disservice to Nick Barnett who did quite a lovely job explaining it to us here at SRT, but I'll give it a go.
So the first thing he explained is you want to think of Search Household from an individual up to household, not from the household down to an individual. And it is most useful when you are pulling lists with multiple criteria, some of which could live on an individual and some of which could live on a household.
Consider the following example:
John and Jane Doe are a household. They donate (and in our organization we push all contributions to the household in v11). Jane is also a board member. I want all board members who have donated.
If I put in the criteria for donation I'd get the household. If I put in the criteria for the board member I'd get Jane and in my list I'd get a big fat zero people because there is no overlap.
Now. If I say search household on the donation it will evaluate that donation information for both the individual and primary affiliated household. So it would draw both Jane and Household into the pool of people for that criteria, then look at that board information which sits on Jane and finally return a list of Jane. What it won't do is 'jump' to the other individual affiliated with the household (you'll never see John in this scenario).
This is simplified from what it does technically, but I find that this example does kind of kick off an 'ohhh' moment for that Search Household checkbox.
Does that help at all? And someone pipe in if I've completely glommoxed it, because I fully admit to being capable of that.
- Heather
Heather you explained it beautifully, using the same kind of example I would have used.
To sum it up a little more, you only need to use the Search Household box when you want individuals on your list and you are using a mix of criteria that looks at some data that might be on the household and other data that you know is only on the individual, like the contribution data (household) and board constituency (individual) in Heather's example.
When I was trying to wrap my head around all the different relationship changes in lists and extractions I went into our test system and added a 'test' attribute to a handful of accounts. I inlcuded a mix of households, individuals (both connect to households and not) and businesses. I then used that criteria to pull lists and change the different relationship factors. Using a very small set of data helped to really understand what is happening in lists now.
That's a brilliant tip Boann, thanks!