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.