When to Create a New Constituent: Spouse as PII

Emmet OConlon

Hello all,


We have an internal rule that we do not create new constituents unless there are two pieces of personally identifiable information (PII), like name and address, or name and phone, or name and email. I was wondering: Would/should a spouse name be considered PII? I'm not quite sure...


TY for your thoughts!

Keri Barnhart

Good question!


My instinct is to allow the spouse as PII only if the spouse meets the criteria independently. The point of PII, beyond having at least one form of contact, is to help with identifying duplicates and valid details, right? so if all you know is that Chris Jones is married to Joey Jones, is there any way to identify Chris as the Chris Jones who is catfancier8478@hotmail.com vs the Ms. Christina Jones who is married to Joeandy Jones...


For non-donors, we actually require 2 bits of PII in addition to a name, and [spouse name + spouse phone/email] is valid if we only have a different phone/email for the constituent. We want to make it so that that our researchers can positively identify Jr vs Sr if we give them Robert Hernandez at 123 Main St. If they're donors, we'll take what we can get so that we can book the gift, but we grumble about the lack of details to work with.