Best way to manage const records with multiple family members?

Carol Cheng:

What is the best way to manage multiple family members that are participants on many different levels?  For example, the donors (husband and wife); maybe one of them is a volunteer or on the Board; they and their children run in the annual 5K; one kid is also a donor b/c of raising money through piggy bank/penny collections; the high school child is a volunteer for a tutoring program we provide.

 How would you handle all of these:  Would you have one constituent record with many relationships?  Would you have the main person on the constituent record be the Board member?  Does the kid's fundraising make him/her a separate donor and therefore const record?  Does the attribute tab on a relationship allow for participant in an event?

Carol,

The answer to what is the 'best way' from my perspective depends on your org.  We determined that we needed separate spouse records due to similar situation you described (board, volunteer, committee, donors, etc).  I'll be honest, at times I wish we just had one family record but the actuality of what you can record for a non-constituent spouse are too limiting.  And yep, we've got some children that have their own records because they are donors and/or employees.  We do have relationships on each record showing these connections.

I believe there are several suggestions on the RE discovery ideas page on how head of household/family members are handled as it can be a challenge.

It can get tricky as Head of Household filtering/processing only factors in spouses, not children.  So, children with their own records will pull for mailings unless they are coded specifically by solicit code/attribute/etc not to.  We can't filter to just one piece per address as there may be multiple donors/staff members/Y members in at an address. 

You may want to look at how you think you'll need to pull data/labels etc in the future.  For us, the children who are donors/staff need their own records for acknowledgements/receipts.  The volunteer may need to receive a mailing to volunteers.  It can get sort of messy!  We have used an attribute to denote that spouse has record/will pull in query as it's not always the HOH we want to pull for some solicitations.