Attributes

Attributes work.

Depending on your need for the data, another option is a record for the committe and relationships to the individuals serving on the committee. It they are large committees and you want to show from/to dates the relationships work well. Gives a few more query options IMO. I wouldn't probably do for tons of small committees.


I've done this for our board after seeing it suggested on the forums.

Donna Wolfgeher:

Would the Attribute tab be a good place to track which constituents belong to various committees within the organization?

Donna Wolfgeher:

Would the Attribute tab be a good place to track which constituents belong to various committees within the organization?

I would also suggest looking at Constituent Codes. At my last organization, we recorded members of the Alumni Council, the Board of Trustees, and the Foundation Board this way. We used the to and from dates, but when they left the board or council, we would change the Constituent Code to "Former Alumni Councilor" or whatever was appropriate. We did this becuase we pulled lots of other things based soley on their membership in one of these boards, especially mailing lists. It was easy to include or exclude based on Constituent Code, where it wouldn't be as easy to do so from Relationships. 


That said, if you have a Constituent Code that is the primary connection with the person, and they are rotating members of several committees, I would probably go with a combination of Attributes with Notes. I just found Relationships so cumbersome it was really annoying when it came to queries. If I were using Relationships, I don't think I'd create each committee as a separate organization - that seems like too many non-constituent records to keep organized but I guess it depends on how important these committees are to your operations and reporting. In Attributes, I'd use the date as an "expiration" date to grab all who were still on the committee (greater than today), or leave the date blank for current members and put the end date in (Attribute date = blank). The comments could be used for whichever date you didn't use in the date field, and/or their office (if any) in the committee (President). I'd then make a Notes category of "Committee Activity" so you could easily pull all notes on just that, and make the description of the first and last one just "Joined Committee (Treasurer) 01/01/18" and "Left committee 12/31/18" or similar. That's easy to read quickly in the Notes page.


Gracie Schild

Bluebird Business Services

Santa Fe NM