Query and Report after the records are split

Mitchell We

Hello. We are separating the new parents next year so each of the spouse has their own record.

What happens to the query and reports? Any efffects? Any comments would be appreciated.

JoAnn Strommen

Mitchell,



What the difference might be depends on how you've counted/analyzed data in the past and how you enter gift data with records separated and the options you select for query/reports.  If you're doing a count of parents, I'm assuming you previously counted Mr & Mrs Smith as 2.  Now you will just pull Mr Smith and Mrs. Smith separately. 



If you soft credit gifts to spouses and include soft credits in your reports, you may have cases where $ is pulled twice. 

If you're only separating "new parents" but not continueing parents, you will have to see how that affects your reports.  Mailing lists you'll be able to use the HOH feature to just sent to one. 



I would be sure to have an addressee/saluation format on all records that includes names of both spouses when there is a spouse. (I've heard of orgs that only include the format for both names when there is a spouse - we have it on all.  The smart function of add/sal just uses one name if that's all there is. So much easier to set up mail merge docs just using the one format.)



I would be sure to have them linked as spouses so add/sal formats pull correctly and you can share address info more easily. 



Hopefully you'll get some more insights from a user at a school who has made this change.  I'm sure there are some other things to be aware of.

Karen Stuhlfeier

At the school I work at and at the previous school I worked at each spouse has their own record, are linked as spouses and are soft credited for each others gifts. This is not a problem at all. Both reports and exports have the option of reporting the head of household record only or both records. In query in the tools menu you can count gifts for the donor only, both the donor and the soft credit recipients or just the soft credit recipients. You just have to know what you want to report on. I think that both parents should have their own records.

Christine Cooke 2

All the schools I have worked at have the parents with separate constituent records, linked as spouses.  It works fine with everything.  



2 things.  

1.  Be sure they are each soft-credited for all the past activities of each other and that it will auto-soft credit on future activities after the split.



AND 2. very important!  Choose a protocol as to who of the couple should be HoH.  It is allways the father?  Is it always the mother?  If there are two fathers or two mothers how will you establish which is the HoH.  



I do recommend putting all giving on the HoH record moving forward after the split, except for event purchases/acitvity.  It does make reporting etc. a little bit easier.

Carolyn Moatz

We don't have a record for every parent, but we do have parents where both have records, and we use an attribute to remove the not-head-of-household person from everything. It makes it really easy in reports.

Jessica Radomski

We just split spouse records and here are some things I implemented:



The HOH is always the female unless a male constituent is a board member. The non-HOH has a constituency code 'Spouse'. Since my school relies heavily on the campaign progress report, I didn't want to double count parents, grandparents, etc. Also, by assigning the constituency code 'spouse' to non-HOH records, I am able to obtain a clear picture of our soliciitable constituents. 



For the non-HOH, I also assigned an attribute of 'Eliminate from queries/reports'. 



I book all gifts under my HOH and soft credit the non-HOH. 



All contact information, notes and proposals live under HOH record. 



When someone navigates to the non-HOH record, a note pops up that lets them that this is the spouse record and they should go to HOH record to see full giving history, notes and etc. 



The two main reasons why we split records is for event registration and online donations. 



Good luck!

Laura Marziali

Hi!

Do you know if there is a way to split records without Education Edge?