Reciprocal Relationship Brainstorm!

Cait McGrath · May 2017

Hi all,

I've recently realized my org didn't have the relationship option of "volunteer" for organizational relationship. I am going to begin using it, because we have many constituents who are connected to organizations that we support either as members or through grants. Previously, this info was being left to linger forever in the notes tab (aka the graveyard). I was wondering if anyone has any ideas for what might be the reciprocal relationship for a volunteer? I know I could do business association, or maybe even double volunteer? Thoughts? Advice??

Thanks so much!

Alicia Barevich · May 2017

We use the reciprocal relationship of "Organization." This has always felt kinda weird to me, but I haven't come up with anything that's actually any better.

JoAnn Strommen · May 2017

We also use similar. We use Org / Group / Board / Assoc. Based on constituent name user can see which of those it is. Our relationship is also a bit broader: Org member / Board / Vol. For our purposed these are specific enough. You may need more.

Gina Gerhard · May 2017

We use Volunteer and Volunteer Organization (so they are paired together).

Just a caveat with Volunteers and addresses:

Let's say you're creating a new volunteer on the volunteer organization record as a relationship.

When you get to the checkboxes at the bottom:
- Primary Business Information = No
- Employee = No
- Contact = (maybe, depending on your definitions)
Let's say you have an email address for them.
- In order for the email to be 'seen' by NetCommunity, they need to have their own constituent record.
When you create a constituent record from the relationship (using Relationship/Add this individual as a Constituent)
- It creates a business address on the record with the address from the volunteer org.
- When you go to produce a mailing or export address information for your new constituent, THE BUSINESS NAME WILL BE MISSING
- It's because it isn't their Primary Business.
So these can be a problem if need to use the data.

What we do (as a workaround) is:

Change the address type to Volunteer
Enter the organization name as the first line of the address

So now you can actually produce a legitimate address that shows the constituent with the Business name and the address.

I wish Raiser's Edge had a better way to produce a relationship which is just a volunteer/contact (not employment) that actually produces a legitimate mailing address without this workaround.

Has anyone found a better way to handle this? (other than pretend like it's their employment) ...

Tammie Cach Abdu · May 2017

Gina Gerhard:

We use Volunteer and Volunteer Organization (so they are paired together).

Just a caveat with Volunteers and addresses:

Let's say you're creating a new volunteer on the volunteer organization record as a relationship.

When you get to the checkboxes at the bottom:
Primary Business Information = No

Employee = No

Contact = (maybe, depending on your definitions)

Let's say you have an email address for them.
In order for the email to be 'seen' by NetCommunity, they need to have their own constituent record.

When you create a constituent record from the relationship (using Relationship/Add this individual as a Constituent)
It creates a business address on the record with the address from the volunteer org.

When you go to produce a mailing or export address information for your new constituent, THE BUSINESS NAME WILL BE MISSING

It's because it isn't their Primary Business.

So these can be a problem if need to use the data.
What we do (as a workaround) is:
Change the address type to Volunteer

Enter the organization name as the first line of the address
So now you can actually produce a legitimate address that shows the constituent with the Business name and the address.

I wish Raiser's Edge had a better way to produce a relationship which is just a volunteer/contact (not employment) that actually produces a legitimate mailing address without this workaround.

Has anyone found a better way to handle this? (other than pretend like it's their employment) ...

This isn't volunteer related, but it is relationship related, so I thought I'd tag on. I hope you don't mind Cait.

It appears I've stumped RE support, or we were told wrong before we converted. Anyway, we have 2,300 funds, and are using Fund Relationship to track Finanical manager, endowment contact, and for the Sport related funds, Sport Coach. I can't seem to get the CURRENT Coach to list, it keeps giving me the previous (end dated) Coach in my output. Today the Support person I talked to, said that using Fund Relationship that way was "Odd". What kind of relationships ARE supposed to be on a Fund? How do you all use it?

Judith Raub · May 2017

Thanks for the heads up. We currently do not use the volunteer module but plan to soon. Right now, if they are in, they are in as Employment or an attribute. This is good information to know before moving forward.

As for the Fund Relationship, reports do not use the end date so we are trying to delete previous Fund Managers over 4,000 and are starting to manually take them off of the record. We actively use our Fund Relationship for Primary Contact for Endowment Reports, Fund Managers for Budget notes of donors and those receiving a Scholarship. Just wish I knew how to import and globally clean them up better.

Good luck all.

Thanks.

Cait McGrath · May 2017

WOW! Thanks for all the excellent ideas, everyone. I definitely have so options that I hadn't even thought about that were sitting right there in my relationship tables already. Y'all rock.

Reciprocal Relationship Brainstorm!

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