Mass Marking Heads of Household for Non-Spouses

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Matt Page
Matt Page ✭
Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 2 Photogenic
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
We have a lot of records for people who live at the same address but are not married. They might be any one of the following:

 - A group of single people sharing a house/flat

 - A family where the children are constituents as well as the parents

 - An unmarried couple

 - A brother and sister sharing a house (or any other relationship)

 - Two people that might be married that we don't know for certain



I want to group them together and mark one of them as "Head of Household" to make the most of the HoH fundtionality with mailings and exports. At the moment they are not even marked as having a relationships with each other.



But I'm coming up against three issues:

1. Even when I'm trying to do it manually I can't seem to mark someone as a head of household who is not the person's spouse

2. Even if this can be done for two people I can't see how it can work for 3 or more

3. I can't work out how to do this en masse as either an import or a group add/change.



Has anyone got any ideas? UK chat support seems to have been down everytime I've tried to use it recently.



Thanks



Matt
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Comments

  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen ✭✭✭✭✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Matt, Until function of HOH field is changed it does only work with spouse relationships.  From what I've seen on the forums, the work around most people adopt is a solicit code to exclude the "non-HOH" relationships or an attribute with same purpose.  That seems to be the cleanest things I've read about people doing.  You may find those posts by searching the forums.
  • John Heizer
    John Heizer ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 3 Photogenic
    This is a well-known issue with RE with lots of suggestions in the Ideas list.  Here are just a few where you can add your votes:



    http://rediscovery.uservoice.com/forums/137015-raiser-s-edge-discovery-topics/suggestions/3353062-not-head-of-household-option



    http://rediscovery.uservoice.com/forums/137015-raiser-s-edge-discovery-topics/suggestions/6858506-allow-head-of-household-to-be-assigned-to-indivi



     
  • Matt Page
    Matt Page ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 2 Photogenic
    Thanks John and JoAnn for clearing things up.



    It does make me wonder why they adopted such misleading terminology as "Head of Household". Wouldn't preferred partner / main partner be better wording? 



    I've voted on the first of those links.



    Thanks





    Matt
  • Alan French
    Alan French ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 3 Name Dropper Photogenic
    I think the wording is probably a holdover from when RE automatically assumed that the male constituent was the head of household (I'm told that was the case for earlier versions), so it had less to do with who actually preferred to receive communications. Thankfully the HOH functionality has now moved with the times! smiley
  • Christine Cooke 2
    Christine Cooke 2 ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    May I suggest a Addressee/Salutation that is The Smith Jones Family, or the Smith Family.  That way when you export lists you can removed all the ones that are not marked HoH and do have that Addressee, so that you are addressing it to everyone in the household, in case they are siblings or roomies etc.



    Curious, what parameters/protocol are you using to decide who should be HoH?
  • Matt Page
    Matt Page ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 2 Photogenic
    Thanks Christine,



    In honesty I've not fully thought that through, but I was probably going to list the oldest record on the database as Head of Household, but to use a catch-all type addresse/salutation.



    Matt
  • Christine Cooke 2
    Christine Cooke 2 ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    I am a believer that there needs to be an overall protocol/procedure for establishing HoH through all of your records.  There probably isn't one.  I know I find it very difficult to establish any consistency without those rules in place.  That is part of why I asked you about your deciding factor.  It is larger than just duplicates in a household.
  • Rachel Bailey
    Rachel Bailey ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic

    Matthew Page:
    Thanks John and JoAnn for clearing things up.

    It does make me wonder why they adopted such misleading terminology as "Head of Household". Wouldn't preferred partner / main partner be better wording? 

    I've voted on the first of those links.

    Thanks


    Matt

    You can actually change what the Spouse button displays as:
    • Config
    • Fields
    • Individual Relationship
    • At the bottom of the Field Options is a section that says "Display the word 'spouse' as:" and you can fill in how you want that button to appear.  We call it "Partner."
    Since you have to define Relationship and Reciprocal further anyway (i.e. Husband/Wife, Parent/Child, etc.) you can use the "Spousal" link and HoH functionality on a lot more Constituent pairs that reside at the same address.

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