Grouping constituents for gift reporting and prospect management

We've done this sort of thing with attributes.  


So in your scenario of 5 different records we'd take the PRIMARY one (let's say #1) and we'd put his RE ID into an Attribute called "Primary Record of" on the other four records.  So we could query on every record with a "Primary Record Of" = blank.


And then, yes, we assign each person to the same Development Officer...

 

This is exactly the issue we tried to solve several years ago. 


We have two attributes:

1. Donor Count Type = Primary, Secondary, or blank. Blank helps to distinguish those ones we haven't looked into yet.

2. Primary Donor = constituent's record of the primary one (same for the whole group).


Additionally, at least primary record should be soft credited for all the gifts (meaning it should have relationship to every record in the group), plus they should be assigned to the same person, plus should have the same Donor Type attribute (giving level).


Works for us - now fundraisers can look just at primary and be sure they are seeing the full giving history, we can count these groups as one donor in our reports, we can export lists with just primary donors etc. Involves lots of maintenance though - I even had to develop some Python script that completes the exported from RE data with Primary donor ID (in RE you can export name from attribute, but not ID ?‍♀️) via SKY API, then parses the data and separates incorrect records into several files with different "diagnosis" - i.e., secondary without primary, different donor types, not soft credited gifts, etc. Sometimes I really hate it as I now ALWAYS have to remember to include these two attributes into export and sort by them to see the groups correctly.


Hope it helps, let me know if any questions - happy to share what we have!

I think there is no other way - you have to invest a lot of time in the beginning anyway. I spent quite much time grouping them together (starting with major donors, then moving on to lower level ones), but after that it's just weekly/fortnightly check ups with some tweaks. For soft crediting, you will need to come up with a set of rules for each case - e.g., always soft credit spouse, always soft credit joint record and both spouses, do not soft credit contact person for organisation's gift, leave previously soft credited gifts in place when a couple divorces, etc. Unfortunately, we don't have a written procedure at the moment - just a memory dump in Excel spreadsheet (can send it to you if you wish).

It is a very hard task, really. We were also looking into Salesforce and their concept of households, but it is pretty much the same. It's a pity RE doesn't have any built in functionality for this.