Reverting Constituent Relationships to NonConstituents

ShawnAlis Cusato

Has anyone ever gone from having full constituents to changing some to nonconstituents?  We are interested in making one spouse of each couple a nonconstituent.  We are one patch away from the most current RE version; we integrate with EE; we are a high school and expect the student would remain a full constituent.


Any ideas, thoughts, warnings to pass on?  If you've done this kind of procedure or worked RE before and after, your knowledge would be gold to us!  If you've only dreamed of it, please let me know why you dreamed and what stopped you from going through with it?


Thanks so much for your help!

JoAnn Strommen

Have the same question, just on the scale of a few records. Last week did that with one spouse. To me, I don't know that it was worth the manual work to do it. My instance had no info/notes/attributes etc on spouse record that needed to be kept. Checking each record for that alone takes time.


Will be following for others comments.

John Heizer

ShawnAlis Cusato:

Has anyone ever gone from having full constituents to changing some to nonconstituents?  We are interested in making one spouse of each couple a nonconstituent.  We are one patch away from the most current RE version; we integrate with EE; we are a high school and expect the student would remain a full constituent.


Any ideas, thoughts, warnings to pass on?  If you've done this kind of procedure or worked RE before and after, your knowledge would be gold to us!  If you've only dreamed of it, please let me know why you dreamed and what stopped you from going through with it?


Thanks so much for your help!

No way I know of other than merging any needed data, deleting the spouse constituent record and adding a new non-constituent spouse record.

Jen Claudy

As Jo Ann said, it may not be worth the time and effort.  You could use the Merge Function and enter the name on the Spouse record manually.  Assuming you have a decently high volume of these, you might look at Exporting data and Importing onto the record you want to keep.  You would still need to (I think) manually delete those now-defunct records.

Jessica Smith 4

We have had similar discussions recently as well. We are also a high school. Our students are not constituents in RE until they graduate and become alumni though. Parents is what had us scratching our heads. We also integrate with EE but other than performing the integration once in a while, I have nothing to do with EE. So it puzzles me why some students will have both mom and dad come over to RE as constituents, while others have one come over as a constituent and the other parent comes over as an individual/non-constituent on the other parents relationship record. We have debated on how this may skew parent data on donations and analysis and how we should handle it. Have one parent per household, add both parents as constituents, etc. Seems like there would be a lot of manual work to change the ones we don't want to integrate as full constituents and to go back and convert the ones we have. Interested to see what else the community can add.

ShawnAlis Cusato

Thanks for the replies.  It is an enormous project--still in the idea stage.  If we decide to go this route I'll let you know!

Jill Freidmutter

If you think you may get TeamRaiser (a Blackbaud peer-to-peer fundraising platform) don't create non-constituent spouses! Years ago I combined a number of separate spouse records into joint records. This year we moved to TeamRaiser, and the integration with Raiser's Edge requires that each person who donates have an individual record. We often have each member of a couple give to their friends' participation in the event. (I link them as spouses to create a joint salutation and use the Head of Household field to limit duplicate mailings.)