Tracking Citizenship

Sherry Aldrich · February 2020

I am wondering how others track citizenship? In RE there is a birthplace, and ethnicity, but I don't see a place to do citizenship.

Thanks

Sherry

Austen Brown · February 2020

Hi Sherry Aldrich‍ - We do not track this Citizenship. However, I would recommend that you add a constituent attribute to track this; make a table field instead of a text field.

Gracie Schild · March 2020

Hi - another option is to use a field (like religion) that you might not otherwise be using. We did this at the tribal college where I used to work, changing Religion to Tribal Affiliation. It backfired a little because of the difference between official tribal affiliation (enrolled member of the X Tribe) as opposed to how the person wished to be recognized (Hopi/Santa Clara/Choctaw - whatever combo). Before I left there, we were planning on taking over Ethnicity (which we also ignored) and making it the official tribal affiliation, leaving the Religion field to be the tribal "recognition" name.

The point of that story in your case is to encourage you to use fields that are unused. We did the same with another field (trying to remember the name...) - it became the name of the "pass-through" (like Schwab Charitable, Fidelity, United Way, etc) for DAFs or payroll deductions. We could then insert it into letters or wherever it was needed. I used a LOT of Attributes, but something so "connected" to the constituent as citizenship seems to need a permanent home. Just think it through really carefully and make sure you've considered all the ramifications and to what future uses you might put that information.

Gracie Schild

Bluebird Business Services

Santa Fe, NM

Sherry Aldrich · March 2020

Gracie Schild , is there a way to change the label in RE to be citizenship? or would we just need to know that religion = citizenship?

Thanks

Sherry

Austen Brown · March 2020

Sherry Aldrich‍ - You can change any field name by going to Config > Fields and replacing the entry under Display As. To change the "Religion" field, look under Constituent (near the bottom); verify that the box under Hidden is unchecked.

Sherry Aldrich · March 2020

Thank you all for your help, this will at least get us started. I noticed this field is not available in NXT .

roger berg · March 2020

Yep - the irritating, "not available in NXT" issue... We use the Religion field on Bio2 but it does NOT exist in NXT so I had to create a Religion attribute and do a bunch of Global adds to come up with a work-around for NXT.

Moral of the story is, it's great to re-purpose unused RE fields, but if they don't exist in NXT you're going to have to create an attribute (Custom Field in NXT) anyway...

Sherry Aldrich · March 2020

roger berg 'Not in NXT' is frustrating but I'm sure it will catch up eventually . Instead of making duplicate fields (for example, religion/citizenship and also an attribute), if i need a list based off from a non available field in nxt, I'll create a static query and use that for the base of my lists for now. I don't want to set myself up for heavy clean up later. Also if my users are updating records, i don't want them to have to update in 2 places, the data integrity will go down quickly.

I agree there are many benefits in re-purposing fields we are sure we wont' need in the future.

Most of what i still do for reporting is still in the database view using reports / exports. The database is up to date and all the fields are available. I spend most of my day as admin in the database. For now I guess I just try to find the happy medium between the 2 systems.

Tracking Citizenship

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