Spouse Records

We have many cases of records for both spouses.  Both have relationship with our org, one or both may be donors.  Yes, at times it can be messy.  For mailings you'll need to utilize the HoH function to prevent duplications. 



If you search the forums you'll find many threads/posts debating this issue.  Don't have time to elaborate more right now.

Our best practice is to always create only one record for spouse/partners. This makes the most sense on many levels including marketing, membership, gift tracking & receipting, event module use, address changes, etc. However, there are times when two records are necessary. Examples of when we break the rule are: 1) If they are both volunteers at our organization so that each person can have their own volunteer record, 2) if they are both prominent members and require their own set of contact information, board member codes, and corporate add/sals, 3) if they were both members before they got married and each one has their own extensive history. 



In the case where each spouse/partner has their own record, in addition to linking the reciprocal relationship and marking one as 'Head of Household', we also earmark that record as Primary and the other as Secondary by adding a constituent code on the BIO 2 tab of each record indicating 'linked record primary' and 'linked record secondary'. A pop-up annotate is also added to the secondary record to warn Data Entry that all gifts and membership information should be entered on the primary record. Occasionally, something will get entered on the secondary record in error, but it is very rare and can be easily identified and fixed by running a query on a regular basis.  



Having only one record per spouse/partner relationship, if possible, makes for a much cleaner and more manageable database.

 

Sue Tucker:

I totally agree with your answer.  In the case when you have two records, do you create "soft credits" for the secondary records?



thank you for your response...this is very helpful.



Sue

We do not soft-credit the secondary record since both people are together on the primary record and both are included in the primary add/sals, e.g., Mr. and Mrs. John Smith. Only one gift acknowledgement is necessary if it is going to the same household. We don't have our Config set up to autmomatically soft credit relationships and only do so on a case-by-case basis from within the gift, if necessary. The primary record is treated as the main activity record for both people.  Depending on the situation, sometimes the secondary record becomes inactive, but we do not want to merge them if each person had a long history with our organization. We have over a quarter million constituent records and the practices we have developed have evolved over many years to what works best for us.

I also preferred to keep 1 record for spousal relationships, with standard exceptions (as mentioned in other responses on this thread).



While I am sure people can manage having two records, I hesitate because if extra care isn't taken, there potentially could issues with reporting. Also, I have looked into Raiser's Edge NXT (that everyone will eventually be converted to) and their pricing is based on number of records. NOT number of RE Users. So if you have 2 records for every spousal relationship, this could quickly make your pricing package go up. Just food for thought.

Depending on the situation, there are two ways that we would deal with this. One would be to send the receipt only to the person who gave the gift and in the reference field note it. In this case we would ask the person first if they are OK with it. However, if this is a couple who is going to be making such requests on a regular basis, then we would create a separate record. Some couple do prefer to have separate giving histories, although it is very rare in our organization.

Here's a new thought, for anyone interested in doing some cleaning.



I did some research into my database and found that I have about 23k records who are spouses with no giving history (meaning all of the giving history is on the other spouse's record). My plan is to migrate all of these records into relationship records and removing the constituent record related to them.



Here's the basic query I'm using to locate these people:

• Spouse Constituent ID <NOT BLANK>
• AND Total number of gifts = 0 (didn't add any criteria to this summary info piece)
• AND Total individual relationships = 1 (avoiding anyone with more complicated relationship trees - I can work on cleaning them up manually later)
• AND Total organization relationships = 0 (same reason as above)

Here's how I'm going to do it:



1.) Painstakingly ensure that any other information that exists on these records (appeals, attributes, etc.) is merged into the "head of household" spouse. There really aren't that many records like this, and it's easy enough to query for them (e.g., "assigned appeal <NOT BLANK>")

2.) Once that cleaning is done, I will export all of their biographic information and their spouse's constituent ID number. Basically, anything that lives on Bio 1 and thusly can live in a relationship record will get exported into a .csv file.

3.) Globally delete all of those records.

4.) Add columns to my .csv that define the relationship and reciprocal relationship.

5.) Using the spouse constituent ID I exported, I'll import all of this info as new relationship records on the remaining spouse's record. NOTE: Once this information is in, the existing spouse's addressee/salutation should be just as it was before deleting the spouse constituent records.



So, bam, suddenly I've shifted my organization down an entire pay tier. Right now, we're only a few hundred constituents away from 200k. After this, we'll be closer to 175k. That's a savings of several thousand dollars per year for us. 



DISCLAIMER: If you find that you don't have enough spouses to actually impact your NXT payment amount, then this might be too risky to attempt. Also, make sure you have access to a recent backup of your database before attempting any of this. And for the love of god, if you're not really, really confident in your query and import skills, don't try this. It's easy to do lots of damage when dealing with so much data. 

Wow, is that true? I'd be a little surprised by that, but I have 0 familiarity with NetCommunity. We do our emailing through Sphere (switching soon to Luminate).

Gina Gerhard:

Ryan - I'll just also mention that if the spouse has their own email address and you email through NetCommunity, they need their own record?



 

Gina Gerhard:

Essentially, RE was intended to record households unless there is a real reason to have the spouses separate. 

I think this statement is the key -- and if you have spouses that serve on your boards and committees, I'd think that's an actual reason to have them separate.  



And thinking forward about longer-term maintenance of your records, if you somewhat bury relationship data in comments or notes field, you will often miss these when the relationships change.  If you have a separate record created for the spouse, it's very obvious and up-front.



But you do need to understand how RE wants you to handle these relationships - address sharing, soft crediting gifts, head of household processing for mailings, etc.

 

Well said Gina!  I too am an acvocate of having the INFORMATION you NEED on constituent records - so many times I think we tend to forget that RE is a DATABASE and you want to be able to access the information you need.  Yes the HOH and soft credits can seem to be a pain, but I believe it's less of a pain than trying to find some burried information in an attribute or other comment record.

 

We used to have separate constit records for spouses (in our previous database, Advance). When we decided to convert to TRE, our newish Exec Dir of Advancement Services decided to take that opportunity to make “unnecessary” spouse records non-constituent relationship records (we basically downgraded them during conversion). He felt the staff time involved in maintaining those spousal records was not worth it. There are some exceptions where the spouse still qualifies (e.g., they are an alumnus themselves, or a university employee, or other scenarios) as their own ID'd record, but the majority of them are only created as non-constit relationship records now.

I will say that one of the main justifications given for making this change was that when calculating giving, we would only have to look at the HOH instead of summing giving by both spouses. However, we ended up making exceptions for payroll deduction giving and hard-crediting the spouse for those gifts if it was their PD gift. So in essence, we still have to sum giving for both spouses to be sure we have accurate numbers. I found this to be frustrating, as that was one of the main selling points for doing this.

We also consolidated most of our data onto the HOH (ID'd record). Our fundraisers found this to be difficult in some respects. For example, Notes and Actions were consolidated onto the HOH record, which led to confusion where that Action had not actually occurred with the HOH or that Note was specifically referencing the spouse.

Not suggesting one way or the other - just some things we encountered having done it both ways.