Creating Households with 1 name

Hi Louisa -

It's funny you ask this question because we had a very similar discussion/debate back when we first went on to v11. At that time the fabulous Anna Wessely and I were trading theoretical emails about this and really ended up on the fence about it. (Mind you this was back in January when there weren't a heck of a lot of people using v11, so she might have made a decision by now - and I'm totally putting words in her mouth).

Our situation was almost exactly like yours - the box office thought it would be easier in the long run to make households because it was then very easy to add that 2 affiliate if here ever is one. My gut instinct was 'EEK' (I'm not very eloquent in my gut).

After some back and forthing we still remained on the fence. On one hand, there's the consistency of associations/affiliations and how information is stored/tracked etc. There's also just the fact that it was hard to move information from one account to another if you did have to convert to a household (something that I know Tessi is working on improving right away). On the other hand there's all the fun of extra accounts, merging info, false inflation of household numbers, etc.

In the end I let the box office make the call as they are really the people making the most of the front line communications. We may end up changing that decision the longer we are on v11, but we'll see! I've seen enough accounts where we didn't *know* there was a household and then discovered it later to be glad of it so far.

Sorry for the non-answer - hope some of our processing helps you fall on one side of the fence or the other!

Heather 

In the end, we 

Hi Heather,

Thanks so much for your detailed response. So there is no technical issue with creating one name households, correct?

We're still trying to decide what to do--- will probably do the same thing but just want to make sure we won't run into issues later on.

Thanks!

Louisa

Hi Louisa -

No technical issues that we've run into - just make sure that your salutations are set up to handle a one person household. No guarantee that we won't, but we've been doing it for a couple of months now and nothing serious has jumped out and bit us.

And apparently I like leaving cliff hanger posts (it really was just a duplicate line that I rewrote in the 4th paragraph). Since I've been needled by several people about it offline (hey, at least I know people still read my posts!) I'll add the 'in the end' bit with a final caveat here:

We didn’t convert all our individuals to households, nor do we create households on the web - it's really just the box office creating single person households. It’s all about consistency -not (we have none right now). I didn’t want to rule strictly one way or another until we kind of gave it a bit to see what actually worked. I suspect that as Tessitura gets better about being able to move individual pieces of information between household and individual we’ll draw back from creating a household for one person. 

And there's our answer -- complete with the full admission that it is still rather "rough" and not-consistently applied.

- Heather

Hello,

I am glad to read this post.  We had this very conversation come up in our Tessitura migration meeting today.  I can see the point of making households out of all Individuals for box office.  I am also concerned about all of the extra account, merges, etc.  If anyone else has any more experience post-conversion or more thoughts, we are all ears! 

I also think I like the thought of giving the Individual-only accounts a try for a while.  If it creates a huge headache for box office, perhaps we could convert the Individual-only accounts to household accounts.

Best,

Tony

 

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