How do you handle self-employment

Gina Gerhard

Wondering how others handle setting up self-employment for a constituent? Do you:

• Enter both a home and business address that are identical
• Create an organization relationship, name it as the person (ex:  the org name is 'John A. Smith') and mark as their employment
• Just enter all their business related information on their home address
• Other options??

Daniel Noga 2

That's a good question!


Where I worked previously, there were a couple of cases of this, and we pretty much just entered their contact info as home info, but kept in mind that the person ran a business from their home. The other options are interesting, but also potentially confusing to someone who hasn't been briefed on why things are being done that way. To me, it seems most straightforward to enter the info as home info, and if needed, add a Note or Annotation to the record mentioning that the person is self-employed, or even use an Attribute if it happens frequently enough. It seems like the question is, what is the "primary" use for this contact info? The way my mind works, if a person works out of their home, the fact that it's their home takes precedence over the fact that business is done there. Particularly if it's their only place of residence, that's likely to be the more enduring aspect of things. It's really a judgement call, though.

Gina Gerhard

Daniel - Thanks for the points you're making, it's good to get input from others on this.  We have a TON of these in our system so we run into this issue all the time.


In some ways, it's more an issue as to the phone type rather than address type -- and now with 7.95 uncoupling phones from addresses it might be a bit better -- but is their phone a Home phone or a Business phone?  We tended to have a rule that the Home phone went on the Home address, the Business phone on the Business address, so in the cases of self-employment we'd get a proliferation of phone numbers.  Now with 7.95, it may be cleaner and we can probably just record the phone once as a Business phone.

Daniel Noga 2

Gina Gerhard:

Daniel - Thanks for the points you're making, it's good to get input from others on this.  We have a TON of these in our system so we run into this issue all the time.


In some ways, it's more an issue as to the phone type rather than address type -- and now with 7.95 uncoupling phones from addresses it might be a bit better -- but is their phone a Home phone or a Business phone?  We tended to have a rule that the Home phone went on the Home address, the Business phone on the Business address, so in the cases of self-employment we'd get a proliferation of phone numbers.  Now with 7.95, it may be cleaner and we can probably just record the phone once as a Business phone.

I forgot about the phone/address de-coupling, as I've yet to work with 7.95. That changes things, as I would look at the address and the phone number a bit differently. Post 7.95, I suppose I'd stick with labeling the phone number a "Business" number, and my reasoning is that anyone from your org is most likely to be calling them during the day, and during the day, they are most likely to be expecting business calls/answering as a business.

Jen Claudy

We don't have a lot of this, but the few we do have, I enter a Primary Business Relationship and share the Home Address, but set the Address Type to Business.  Then, if it's both husband and wife involved with the business, I adjust the Addr/Sals accordingly.  For phones, if they don't have a separate line for business use, I would select whichever feels most appropriate, and put a Comment in (new feature in 7.95) that indicates it is a home-based business using the same number.  It could very well also be a mobile number...  I think it matters less and less with mobile phones, call forwarding options, etc.  That's what I like about the Comment Field...even if I have to put "see ConstNote" and put a novel in the Note about what number is what, what the donor prefers, etc.

Christine Cooke 2

for consistency purposes and so that it is clear to others, I do not assume:


They are given a business relationship, primary.  Because you may know they are self employed but not what they call their business (it could be their name, it could be something else entirely) I just enter "self employed" in the Org Name, if you know the business is out of their home address, then yes, add it as a business address -- if you are not sure, or only know the city they are working out of, then just had the city and state until you can confirm otherwise.  Relationship and Reciprocal is Business and Owner respectively.  And they should be marked as Main Contact for that org. (even though you may not now the name). Oh, and Position I leave blank unless by chance you learn what it is they are doing, i.e. attorney, MD, actor, therapist, accountaint, consultant, etc.


This way, when you are asked to pull a group of constits with their employer info you get a complete list and one can see who owns a business vs. is employed by someone else. This is a report I am asked to pull a few times a year for a myriad of reasons.


P.S.  Because I have worked in several schools.  I have also found, that if you have confirmation that one parent is a stay-at-home parent and the other works, or they are both stay-at-home (maybe retired), then the Org name is "stay at home parent".  This is a little bit of a hint as to who may be available for volunteer work and committees, in addition to whatever you collect from your surveys.

Faith Murray

I think a lot of it would depend on how your organization communicates with Businesses in general. At our org, we haven't run into a lot of those, but when we do, we typically record the home business name under the "Business" tab of the individual's record, or if they're local or well-to-do, may even create a new Org constituent for the home Business and link them, just like if it were a business run at a different establishment. That way, if you ever need to run an appeal to local businesses -- say, you are looking for sponsors or advertisers for a local fundraising event -- you can pull a list including the home businesses.

Katherine Mannion

While cleaning up business record, I decided that the best solution for us is to use Self Employed as the business name (unless we know what the business name is) and I typically don't even bother filling in address information.  Unless a person asks for us to mail to their business address, it really isn't information we care about.  And our gift officers would ask a person where they'd like to be visited anyway before they go out for a meeting.  Relat/recip is Business/Owner.  The most important piece for us is to identify that this is an Alumni Owned Business, which we record on the attribute tab.