how to mark club, board

Christine Adams:

I don't believe the volunteer tab is a separate module (i.e. prospect). Check with your DBA - they may have it hidden from users.

Hi all. The Volunteer module is an optional module. More information is available on the Pricing & Plans page for RE. Thanks!

ShawnAlis Cusato:

As a school, we have several clubs, councils and boards.  How do you recommend we tag the individuals to show their membership in these groups?  Keep in mind that the members change yearly, and we don't have the membership module.

 Our school board is a constituency code, but I dislike the idea of using cc for the other groups because of their frequency of change and because this is not the primary reason they are in the database.  Attributes would work, but is it the best option? What about a relationship of school/education?  It has date entered and left, status could be used for officers. . .

What do you think?

I have not needed to track what you are looking at in relation to clubs, but I have been able to successfully use attributes to manage other intricate data that I did not have an optional module to manage and find it's flexible enough to customize for my needs.  I cannot speak to using the relationships, but my initial assumption is that may not be as easy to query and report on as attributes can be.  I always try what I'm thinking will work and then test and pull in query and/or reports, then adjust from there.  Good luck!

Gina Gerhard:

I prefer to set up an organization record for the board or club, then create relationships to the members and use the Date From/To dates.

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  This way you have an entire record of all the members and you can easily query on current members, former members or both. 
  
  
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  You can easily view the members as individual relationships on the org record, and you can see the membership on their individual records
  
  
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  You can easily "inactivate" the board or club as you would an organization record
  
  
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  The data isn't spread in different places in your database
  
  
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  There are no constituent codes or secondary coding to maintain
  
  

This seems to me to be the easiest solution?

Gina, thank you, that is helpful.  A couple of follow-up questions.  How do you mark current/former members?  If someone was in the club one year, skipped a year, and in the club the next year, do you keep all of that on one org record?  Or add the org again for new years?

 What do you mean, "inactivate" the board or club?

I think our school board should remain a constituency code, is that how you do it?

Thanks for your help!

Gina Gerhard:

Shawnalis -

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  I would create an org record for the club, and then create individual relationships to constituents
  
  
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    For current members: relationship=Member, reciprocal=club (or whatever descriptor is appropriate)
    
    
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    For former members: relationship=Member, former; reciprocal=club
    
    
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    Enter the Date from and Date to fields with the appropriate dates
    
    

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   For people who have come on/off multiple times, the club record would show them multiple times (as Member or Member-Former with the dates)
  
  

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  If the club no longer operates, then I would mark the org to Inactive (and add Inactive to the end of the name)
  
  

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  I do not use constituency codes because that is essentially entering the same information twice. But I understand that the club members might be more visible as a constituency code on their record.
  
  
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    To find current members, former members or both - I just create queries that find constituents who have relationship to the "club" record and have the relationship of "Member" or "Member, former" or both.
    
    

Very helpful!  Thanks ever so much!