Hi all,
I admit, I never did much with associations in V10, so there are some pieces of V11 affiliations that are less than intuitive to me. My question is what people think the best way is to link someone to an account in a way that will make them searchable, if you don't have much contact information for them. Example: we have a nanny for a given family. She's not a member of the family per se, but we want to search her name and find their record as well, to make the box office's life easier.
Option 1: Continue to use aliases for this, as we did in V10. Have an alias type to label them. The challenge: works well, but doesn't take advantage of the new V11 structure, which seems kind of silly.
Option 2: Create a record for each nanny and affiliate it to the household. The challenge: we usually don't know that nanny's address or any other info about them, so it's kind of silly to create a record for them.
Option 3: Create a "soft affiliation" to the nanny - if we don't know any contact info for the nanny, just list them on the household account with a soft affiliation. The challenge: it seems that even with "Include in search results" checked on that affiliation type, it doesn't actually do the search if it's a soft affiliation. Which makes sense, now that I think about it...
We were planning on using option3, but I'm just now getting deep enough into it to see that it doesn't allow for searching.
Does anyone have any ideas about the best way to do this? Is there another option that I'm missing, that would allow us to use the V11 functionality without creating records that are largely blank, but would still allow a search of the nanny's name to bring up the household record as an option?
Thanks!
Beth
Hi Beth,
My inclination is that in this case aliases are still the way to go. The only reason to create a record for a nanny is if you want to communicate directly with the nanny (i.e. send the nanny an email or brochure). In that case, I would use a primary affiliation to the household so the nanny can inherit the household contact info. If and when you ever receive more contact info for the nanny you can add it and the nanny will stop inheriting that info from the household.
Kevin Sheehan
Senior Documentation & Learning Resources Specialist
Tessitura Network
+1 888 643 5778 x 329
ksheehan@tessituranetwork.com
Beth,
Even though it seems like double-entry, we add an alias and a soft association.
One very common case is our board member's assistants. Many of the assistants do not have personal records and we are not currently interested in creating records just to associate them; however, we do want to capture other important information about them.
In this case, we add an alias to the record so that they will show up in search results. Though we do add their phone number to the general tab, we also include the number in the association notes (we have run into the issue of there being multiple assistants and not sure which number was assigned to which assistant) as well as their email address, name pronunciation (where appilcable), sometimes the hours they are available, etc.
This has been working well for us, even if it requires a little bit of extra time on the front-end.
Amber NewsomeSegerstrom Center for the Arts(714) 556-2122 ext. 4259ANewsome@SCFTA.org