How to record military information in RE

ShawnAlis Cusato

We are finding a lot of alumni who have served in the military.  How much of their information do you keep?  And where?  For instance, number of years served, which branch, deployments, medals, nickname of platoon or battalion, etc.  Notes seems better than attributes because there is too much information.  Does anyone use a relationship?  Since these are alum, I wouldn't need a constituency code, but I will have to be sure add/sals are correctly configured.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE

Shawnalis Cusato:

We are finding a lot of alumni who have served in the military.  How much of their information do you keep?  And where?  For instance, number of years served, which branch, deployments, medals, nickname of platoon or battalion, etc.  Notes seems better than attributes because there is too much information.  Does anyone use a relationship?  Since these are alum, I wouldn't need a constituency code, but I will have to be sure add/sals are correctly configured.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

 How much information and where to keep it would depend on how you will use the information.  If you want to run reports based on branch, for example, then attributes might be a good place.  If it's considered general information that you would never base a report on, and there isn't another specific field for the information, then notes might be the best place (keeping in mind, again, that you will never report on it).  Also consider how many constituents this information applies to.  If you have this information for 99% of your alumni then you might be better off with codes/attributes than notes.

Jason Black

Shawnalis Cusato:

We are finding a lot of alumni who have served in the military.  How much of their information do you keep?  And where?  For instance, number of years served, which branch, deployments, medals, nickname of platoon or battalion, etc.  Notes seems better than attributes because there is too much information.  Does anyone use a relationship?  Since these are alum, I wouldn't need a constituency code, but I will have to be sure add/sals are correctly configured.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

I agree with Josh - it really depends upon how you'll use it and how easy it is to collect it.  Nearly a quarter of our alumni are military/veteran.  We track their military service the same way we track employer/employee relationships.  Employer is United States Military.  To the extent possible, we keep track of branch of service (Department field), Pay-grade or rank (Position field), Reserve or Retired status (Profession field), and, less frequently, a service range (Date from and Date to fields).  We don't do reporting from any of this, but do frequently run queries for creating direct mail solicitations for military scholarships to these alumni.  The detail we track is only for internal development officer information, but it comes over from our student records database, so it's not terribly difficult to obtain.  And it's generally well outdated, so it doesn't mean much anyway.