Education Customization and Version 11.0
Currently in version 10.0 when a constituent who is a grandparent purchases one of our child classes we create an association to a separate constituent record that contains the grandchild information. . Now that we are going to version 11.0 we are considering creating an affilation of Grandchild.
I am noticing that most of the grandchildren that are associated in our version 10.0 system have the same address as the grand parents.
I am considering creating a household so the Grandchild is in the same household as the grandparents
How are other organizations handling this scenario. Are you keeping the records separate or are you placing the grandchild into the same household as the grandparents.
Bob
Hi Bob,
When I considered this same question as we upgraded to v11, I looked at our business practice and history. My coworkers and I were also wondering if we should have separate households for the parents and grandparents, how should the children be linked, etc.
For the way we track info and run our classes, we rarely know the contact details for both the parents and the grandparents. If we happen to have both families in the database, we rarely know that they are all related. In addition, our custom reports and web functionality were tied to a single "child" association. Also, each time the education department created a child, we needed to make sure to record the gender, birthday and special needs. Lastly, when considering a new way of categorizing something like affiliation types, I try to think, "Am I ever going to need to have this information separated out down the road?" My sense was that since we had never needed to distinguish this before, we would not need to do so in the future.
For all those reasons, we didn't create a grandchild affiliation type for education purposes, preferring instead to stick with "Child Program Participant" as the standard education option for tracking kids. Grandparents are created as a household, and grandchildren are linked as "Child Program Participant," the same as they would be for their parents. This allows our Development department to have a distinct set of affiliations for children, grandchild, etc. that don't require tracking gender, birthday and special needs, and allowed us to more easily upgrade our reports and web functionality.
Hope that helps!