Baby's first post in this group! I am doing data hygiene and looking for recommendations on how to handle university/college organization accounts.
We have several duplicate university accounts, but several are different departments at said university (i.e. department of english, art, history, etc.). I want to have one main account for the university and then link the different departments to that account instead of merging them into one monster account.
The clearest solution I've come to is associating the two organization accounts (in relationships) and then making an association type that's something like "Department/University". What's everyone else doing?
Lynnette Ivey said:The clearest solution I've come to is associating the two organization accounts (in relationships) and then making an association type that's something like "Department/University". What's everyone else doing?
This sounds good to me. We have a similar array of departmental accounts relating to one org, e.g. the massive U of M, but our group sales folks have preferred so far to keep these separate, since group leader, payment details, etc., differ a lot between departments. Having them all link back to one mothership account appeals to me as a DBA, though I don't think anyone in the trenches here would use that association for much.
We also underwent a big data cleanup project a few years ago with our university/college accounts. At the Opera, we define a "school" as a K-12 academic school or a college/university and only those accounts receive the school account type. Anything else (department, alumni association, on campus club, etc) is linked to the school with a relationship. We also created a relationship type of "department" to link the accounts back to the college/university.
Thanks Chris and Sarah! Sounds like I'm on the right path. I'm in development, so building out relationships in Tess is really helpful to keep our efforts organized.
I wish associations would show up in search results like affiliations do OR if organizations could be assigned primary constituents like households. Basically speaking to what Chris is saying, you've gotta be intentionally looking under relationships to find associations.
Lynnette Ivey said:I wish associations would show up in search results like affiliations do OR if organizations could be assigned primary constituents like households.
That sounds like a great IDEA. Please consider adding it to the board:
community.tessituranetwork.com/.../ideas
Meanwhile, you could add aliases to the associated accounts with the main account names.
I like affiliated/associated records where they make sense.
I did a data governence project a while ago that involved tidying the relationships between org and individual or Org & sub org. The issue has been the maintenace part of the data hygiene. We Used attributes to classify a lot of the folks using a 2 tiered heiarchy (eg: top = Govt, lower = Local, State, Federal). Then I wrote a report that would filter off the attribute and show the Top org in the first column (with link to the General tab) and then the Associated account and the relationship values in the subsequent columns. If you schedule it once a month people can run their eye across it and if any changes are needed click through to the Contituent record, edit the relationship, and the continue down the report. It's an easy way to keep up to date, check the status, and update the relationship.
You don't still have access to that report, do you? Gov employees are the bane of my data hygiene existence. I love finding someone whose address it the office of someone who hasn't been in office for 25 years.
I surely do - it's in my Custom Report SSRS library.