Children of Alumni--constituents?

Shawnalis Cusato:

When you add children to RE that your Alumni tell you about, do you add them only as a relationship, or do you make them a full constituent?  This is part of a larger concern about whether or not to have non-constituents in the database. 

If you don't make them constituents, what do you do if/when they apply to your school--do you end up with duplicates or is it easy to manage?  Is there a time that you promote them to full constituent status (obviously, if they donate or attend)?  This is a potentially significant number of people if made constituents, so I'd like to anticipate as many pitfalls as possible.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 We add children of alum as relationships. Children only get their own record if they graduate from WSU or become active on a board or some other way (a big shot at a firm we work with). Same with non-alum spouses.

We probably do have children of alum both on the relationship of their parent(s) and with their own record and don't even know it. Typically we have bare bones info about children (name and nothing more) so unless someone tells up two people are connected, we don't have the connection between the alum constituent record and the child's name on their parent's record. Being a University, we don't  have a lot of parental information nor do we do a lot of family activities where we need to know everyone's name. I would imagine that part would be different for a high school.

 Not sure that helps.

laura

Shawnalis Cusato:

Thank you both, that does help.  We've got a rule to have no nested relationships--spouses, businesses, thankfully we don't track pets (HaHa!).  But suddenly this issue has appeared and it does seem absurd to everyone that we would make a constituent of a 6-month old. 

It doesn't seem like you're having problems with this.  Good, maybe we won't either.  We can send birthday cards to relationships, if we want, and should the children ever donate we'll try our best to recognize the relationship with their alumni parent(s).  

Thanks a lot for your input.

Shawnalis Cusato:

Christine, thanks for the information--very helpful.  Just curious--do you use EE? 

We do ask about previous attendees on our application.  And we search as you do. 

JoAnne, you ask an excellent question.  I'm new here and do not know the whole story.  There has been difficulty with mailings because of the relationships, especially those orgs that had multiple employees at multiple addresses, and I believe there were major difficulties with queries used to pull relationships for Alumni mailings and/or NetCommunity purposes.  It's my belief we could manage the mailings and train for the queries, but it is much too entrenched now for change to come easily or soon.

I've seen multiple posts about the difficulty of having non-constituent spouses when you use NetCommunity, so it seems there is a mini-movement by some to have at least all individuals in RE be full constituents.  I suspect those same groups would never even question adding children as constituents because that is not the source of their problem.  But our problem has taken over and drives a considerable amount of our policy and time.

But, we soft credit all spouses and have lots of issues with reports.  My point is that it will never be perfect and even functioning features (like soft credits) cause problems larger than it would seem possible.  I appreciate any and all feedback--this forum is invaluable to me!

 

 Shawnalis - I do not use EE.  The school I just left was still shopping admission software and the registrar's office used PowerSchool.  The school I have just started at is using Whipple Hill (this is their first year with it).  So I am trying to decipher and clean up the holes and inconsistencies from multiple database people and temps and learn how Whipple Hill works.

There could be multiple reasons that your school chose the 'everyone is a constituent' route.  And yes, the NetCommunity as a whole, whether it be BB's net community or another software, really requires that everyone be a constituent if you are uploading and downloading info.  Another reason for everyone being a consituent is the Event module.  You cannot get accurate attendance/ticket purchase reporting without having everyone be a constituent.  And -- if you are a school, you cannot pull an event report with alum info if you do not link to their constituent record.  Needless to say, the event module needs some work.

Yes - I think we all agree that you have to pick your poison regarding constits and non-constits.  But moving forward, or if you are a school, you really do not have a choice.  And BB will have to address the soft credit issues in reporting. Part of the problem is that the SC options are not 'in your face' in most places, like queries, you have to remember to find them, besides the calculations are off, this is mainly due to $ entry being on both records of a marriage.  I have found you have to have stringent rules within your organization as to which record is marked as Head of Household and which record all the $$ lands in.  I have found it is best to 1. Make your rules about HoH and 2. enter all $ on HoH unless it is ticket purchases for an event you are tracking, then the ticket $ goes on the record of the person attending/that purchased.

The other thing about adding children -- is that in development/alumni departments, you have them,but you really do not interact with those records until they graduate, other than having them linked to parents/uploaded onto your website together, and tracking their activities while in school (clubs, awards etc) so they are tagged for no mail for awhile.  And also because they are redundant in mailings.  I have found that I end up giving them a "duplicates in household" solicit code so that I can exclude them from mass mailings when necessary, and giving the HoH an Addressee field of HoH Addressee so that the publication can be addressed to the whole family "The Smith Family" or "The Jones/Smith Family".  It is a long and tedious project, but cut the print/mail costs by 1/3 on average.

 Christine Cooke

Charles Armstrong School