Duplicate Organization Best Practice

Mike Teague

I am looking for best practices for handling Organization with multiple locations.  Should you merge them into one, should you keep them seperate, if you do keep them seperate how do you get an overall giving history or employee history for that org?  For example, I have a bank with multiple branches and they have donated to multiple chapters in our organization. 

Matt Page

Following.


We're a bit ad hoc with this. At a previous organisation I had everything mapped out with the relatioship trees, but it doesn't offer much functionality. We tend to list the offices/locations we deal with and a head office only if we have specific dealings with them.


I feel sure there should be some best practice out there so I'm very much interested to see what others say.


Matt

Jen Claudy

We do this dependent on the organization.  Most often, if multiple branches are giving separately or we have contacts and relationships with folks at a specific branch, we'll have multiple constituent records, linked together, and then to see an overall picture on giving, the gifts from branch records are soft-credited to the headquarters/main record.  Not the cleanest process, but I don't want to go making all sorts of unnecessary records and haven't had time to come up with anything that makes any more sense. 

Carley Haynes

We keep branches separate if they give to us individually. This way we can attribute the correct amount to each business / manager / branch as required. We always have them linked to a Head Office as a subsidiary though, so even though we don't soft credit the head office we can easily pull a query on the organisation as a total if required. 

JoAnn Strommen

We also keep as separate entities.  Makes correspondence and relationships a lot cleaner for things like solicitor assignments.  We do SC corporate office/HQ for gifts.  Full org giving picture could be seen there if needed.

Matt Page

So do you do this using a relationship query or something? Or do you just find use wildcards in the name  or add Constituent ID numbers on a constituent query?

Matt

Donna Hren

Mike Teague:

I am looking for best practices for handling Organization with multiple locations.  Should you merge them into one, should you keep them seperate, if you do keep them seperate how do you get an overall giving history or employee history for that org?  For example, I have a bank with multiple branches and they have donated to multiple chapters in our organization. 

We list the individual branches seperate.  If one office handles all donation we will list that as the mailing address or depending on the situation we will put an annotation on the individual record with special mailing instructions.

 

Mike Teague

Carley Haynes:

We keep branches separate if they give to us individually. This way we can attribute the correct amount to each business / manager / branch as required. We always have them linked to a Head Office as a subsidiary though, so even though we don't soft credit the head office we can easily pull a query on the organisation as a total if required. 

How do you list the Head office as a subisdiary to the branch....and how do you set up the query to see the total giving?

JoAnn Strommen

The branch would be a subsidiary to the head office.  On org record - tab 2 called Org 2 the top field is place to enter the parent corp / HQ.  If all the gifts are SC to the HQ you'd have a complete total giving picture there.  If not, you'd need to make a query. I'd do a constituent query > Specific record > One of and enter the names of all the offices.  Your query could could be by lisiting IDs too.  I choose name so that I know I have the correct record.

Mike Teague

JoAnn Strommen:

The branch would be a subsidiary to the head office.  On org record - tab 2 called Org 2 the top field is place to enter the parent corp / HQ.  If all the gifts are SC to the HQ you'd have a complete total giving picture there.  If not, you'd need to make a query. I'd do a constituent query > Specific record > One of and enter the names of all the offices.  Your query could could be by lisiting IDs too.  I choose name so that I know I have the correct record.

This seems like it woud work...if you have employees of a branch do you also make that relationship to the HQ?

 

JoAnn Strommen

We haven't linked branch employees to HQ record.  Suppose you could be could be confusing to have 3 VP of XYZ and contacting them would be through branch.