Our organization has been using Tessitura for 10 years, and we have started to perform a CRM audit this year to increase efficiency of our data flow, review current processes and retrain staff. One of the things we want to revisit is the structure of where transactional data lives (Household), and where we store email addresses and web logins (Individual). We chose to put emails on the individual level, so we can manage communication preferences on an individual level. We often run into situations where we need to extract transactional information, and email addresses for a project. For example, this year we needed to extract On Account (Event Credit) amounts (Household) and email addresses (Individual) to send a communication for season launch. How have others managed these communication projects without having to do a lot of manual data clean up? What are the pros and cons of putting email addresses on the Household level?
I'd love to follow this conversation since we have actually been considering the opposite move - our org has defaulted to storing phones and emails to households in most cases, and with all of our v16 prep including a Contact Permissions migration, etc., I've had some interest in trying to move emails and phones down to their individual owners since most people don't share inboxes, land lines are going extinct, and there's a tiny chance of future-proofing in case the U.S. ever passes a GDPR equivalent that has to be managed on an individual level. Shuffling contact details around would probably be a gradual, never-ending project if we embarked on it, since I don't know of a way to mass-migrate contact info down to A1 or A2 without having to guess at the right owners, unlike moving up from individuals to households which could be done in bulk. Maybe from your experiences we're better off just sticking with households and not rocking the boat!
Pardon me for thinking out loud more than providing a concrete reply to your question - I'm just curious what thoughts the community has!
Hi Evan - Thank you so much for pointing out the GDPR considerations. We are already having to think about these considerations given the California rules under CCPA. I think this reinforced for me the need to keep the current structure we have of listing email addresses on the individual level. When we decided to structure our constituent records this way, we loved the idea of being able to send different communications to members of the household. However, recently with our integration with WordFly, we have been wanting to include more dynamic transactional data, and we are running into issues when trying to pull household transactions with email addresses. I posted this in another forum, and someone shared this tip with me, so I will pass it along. I'm going to test this out and I will let you know if this works for us.
www.tessituranetwork.com/.../Tessitura.htm