Two Constituents Per Household - Merged Down to One

Lets see:

One thing to look out for are Soft credits from constituents that are not the spouse, for instance from Donor advised funds/ Foundations etc.

Soft credit the future head of household for them first before you merge the 2 records.

Salutations might need to be changed.

I like to bring everything over to the new record first and then immediately take out the duplicate information, but this certainly depends on the amount of attributes/ appeals etc. you have.




 

Candace Chesler:

Sage - if you have the event module - you'll have to re-enter the event participation for the person who is now the non-constituent record. Which gets complicated if the constituents you have declared is the spousal record, has attended events that the primary constituent did not attend. Similarly - if you are tracking volunteer or advocacy efforts in RE - you'll need to determine how to record that if the non-constituent is the volunteer or advocate.

Unless of course - when you said that you were going to merge some constituent records - you didn't mean all. 

 

Larry, each org has to decide what works best for them according to how they operate. Options are:

• Each spouse has their own record with link between them as spouse (one is marked as head of household) - popular method if you deal with events, if both spouses are active with/have relationship to the organization.
• One spouse has a record and their spouse is in the system only as a spouse relationship
• Or somewhere in between. Some orgs create a record for each due to donations/checks/credit cards coming from both or either. Some have one household membership as general rule with the exception being when both spouses are active and need their own record to record details (ex: board member or something else tracked in RE).

Also some things like work for different modules. Don't know anything about Membership module - that may require separate. Have seen posts about needing records for events. Have also seen posts saying when records are separate lots of extra work need to record things like Proposals.


Export and Mail can work with both options, you just have to familiarize yourself with how HOH processing works.


Another issue each org has to decide how to handle when you have separate records in soft-crediting spouses and how to work with that in reporting.


At times some have combined to reduce the number of records in their system when a factor in cost. If spouse is only a relationship but a contact/business owner as a relationship on a business record I don't think you can connect two non-constituents together. Several years ago there was a rumor that future version of RE would require records to be separate.


If you poll the users, you'll find the above and maybe more and most making a solid case why that works best for them.


Hope that helps a bit. You should be fine with both constituents having their own records. It almost seems like new orgs often go with the recommendation of their consultant which varies with the consultant's experience.