Best Practices for Contacts/Relationships

Kate Jwaskiewicz

What are your 'best practices'/policies/procedures for coding contacts on Organization records in RE? We are struggling with updating our Contact Types and Relationships in Organizations so that we pull the appropriate people for 1. Mailings and 2. Solicitation matrix for our volunteer fundraisers. For example - we have one person who is the 'head honcho' decision-maker, etc. at an organization and another who is the 'worker bee' who is the point of contact for things. We need to do major clean-up and I'm interested in what others do. Thanks!

Lisa Geiersbach

Kate Jwaskiewicz:
What are your 'best practices'/policies/procedures for coding contacts on Organization records in RE? We are struggling with updating our Contact Types and Relationships in Organizations so that we pull the appropriate people for 1. Mailings and 2. Solicitation matrix for our volunteer fundraisers. For example - we have one person who is the 'head honcho' decision-maker, etc. at an organization and another who is the 'worker bee' who is the point of contact for things. We need to do major clean-up and I'm interested in what others do. Thanks!

 I'd be interested in hearing what others do as well.  We also struggle with this.

Gina Gerhard

Kate Jwaskiewicz:
What are your 'best practices'/policies/procedures for coding contacts on Organization records in RE? We are struggling with updating our Contact Types and Relationships in Organizations so that we pull the appropriate people for 1. Mailings and 2. Solicitation matrix for our volunteer fundraisers. For example - we have one person who is the 'head honcho' decision-maker, etc. at an organization and another who is the 'worker bee' who is the point of contact for things. We need to do major clean-up and I'm interested in what others do. Thanks!

Kate - Here's my take on this. RE only lets you be 'one-dimensional' with establishing contact types. You can establish any categorization that works for you, but if you have overlap between the categories then there's a problem. We decided to set up the contact types for more general mailing purposes: primary, secondary, other. Our rule is to have only one contact as Primary, maybe 2-3 Secondary contacts, and the rest are Other. So if we're doing a mailing, we can choose to mail to the Primary contacts or perhaps also include Secondary. For any other typing, we created contact attributes to handle these additional requirements for contact typing. These other attributes can be added on anyone who is any type of contact. It's not great because this coding is somewhat hidden, but I think it's the only way to solve this.

Kate Jwaskiewicz

Gina Gerhard:
Kate - Here's my take on this. RE only lets you be 'one-dimensional' with establishing contact types. You can establish any categorization that works for you, but if you have overlap between the categories then there's a problem. We decided to set up the contact types for more general mailing purposes: primary, secondary, other. Our rule is to have only one contact as Primary, maybe 2-3 Secondary contacts, and the rest are Other. So if we're doing a mailing, we can choose to mail to the Primary contacts or perhaps also include Secondary. For any other typing, we created contact attributes to handle these additional requirements for contact typing. These other attributes can be added on anyone who is any type of contact. It's not great because this coding is somewhat hidden, but I think it's the only way to solve this.

Gina, That's actually very helpful because we aren't too concerned with the coding being hidden as long as our Queries and Exports are set-up to pull on those Attributes. I always forget about Attributes! Thanks so much!

Gina Gerhard

Kate Jwaskiewicz:
Gina, That's actually very helpful because we aren't too concerned with the coding being hidden as long as our Queries and Exports are set-up to pull on those Attributes. I always forget about Attributes! Thanks so much!

Kate - Glad this was helpful. I remember this was Blackbaud's 'answer' for this but many weren't really happy since these attributes are somewhat behind the scenes. What would work far better for us as users would be the ability to choose MULTIPLE types for a contact -- not just a single value.

Gina Gerhard

Gina Gerhard:
Kate - Glad this was helpful. I remember this was Blackbaud's 'answer' for this but many weren't really happy since these attributes are somewhat behind the scenes. What would work far better for us as users would be the ability to choose MULTIPLE types for a contact -- not just a single value.

As further reinforcement - there's a suggestion on the IdeaBank that folks could vote on for allowing multiple contact types on a relationship: PLEASE VOTE FOR THIS IDEA: http://rediscovery.uservoice.com/forums/137015-raiser-s-edge-discovery-topics/suggestions/2758210-allow-a-single-relationship-to-hold-multiple-conta