How (and Why) to Create Relationships
We create relationships within DonorDock for a couple of different reasons. Having a parent record like a household or employer, allows us to roll all of the family or employee members up to one record.
Relationships give us insight into what each contact is like individually from a giving perspective, toggling easily to each record. We are also able to track a connection that tells us more about our donors, improving our engagement.
Scenario 1
You have one contact in the system and want to relate them under a household, as you anticipate some of their family members becoming volunteers in the future.
Create a Household
- As a best practice, make sure there are no households already created.
- Click on Create Contact from the Contacts page or from the quick add form.
- Input Household as the type of contact.
- Input the Household Name and input any other necessary data.
- Once you’ve created the household record, navigate to the Contacts page and open the record you want to tie to the household.
- Click on edit and search for the Household you want to connect this contact to.
- Save the changes and see the updates directly in the contacts record, allowing you to toggle between the contact and the household.
- - Note: You can do the same steps to create an employer and connect employees to that employer.
Scenario 2
You have two contacts you’ve created as spouses. You can create a Household relationship from the Spouse tab in an individual contact record.
Create a Household from Spouse Connection
- Navigate to Contacts and access the contact you want to create a household from.
- Click on the Spouse tab.
- Click on Create a Household, which will allow you to split the contact records individually and relate them under one household.
- Navigate to the named household in the individual contact record.
- Click on the Household Members tab to see all of the individuals that are a part of the household.
Scenario 3
Connect Employees Under An Employer
- Navigate to Contacts and access the contact you want to create a household from.
- Click on the Edit contact.
- Scroll through the record to Employer field and search key words of the Employer's name.
- Click on your Employer to create a relationship with and then Save.
- Navigate to the Employer in the individual contact record.
- Click on the Employees tab to see all of the individuals that are a part of that organization.
Best practices for managing Badges and Marketing Lists
Before we do this, it’s important to differentiate the two just as a refresher.
BADGES: Specific identifiers you tie to a contact record to characterize and segment a donor based on things like their demographics, propensity to give, communication mediums and preferences, etc.
MARKETING LISTS: A specific list of people you are going to to communicate with. Marketing lists are more-so the what (what event) and the how (via email). Contacts can be in more than one list and in the same and different lists. Marketing lists are created by pulling contacts through reporting from filters.
There may be instances where you have more than one user applying badges or marketing lists. It’s important to come to an agreement on what badges or Marketing lists to use so there isn’t redundancy in your data or tags that aren’t serving you. However, it’s always great to put into practice a review of your data and clean-up every now and then. We'll debrief running through managing Badges; but the steps we walked through will be the same for Marketing Lists.
Managing Badges
- You will first need to pull any contact with the badge you want to remove by navigating to the Reports page.
- Access a Contacts Report.
- Click on Filter in the contacts report.
- - Include marketing lists or anyone that would have the badge you want to remove
- - Be sure that dates are set to Any so that the system grabs all relevant donors
- Most importantly, be sure to include the Badge(s) you want to remove from the system, as we want to assign them the new badge that will replace the duplicates.
- Click on Run Report.
- Go to Add > Add Badges.
- Input and Apply the correct badge(s) to those people in that report.
- After you’ve updated your contacts with the correct badges, navigate to your Profile by clicking on the initials in the upper right corner.
- Click on Settings.
- Scroll down and click on Badges.
- Click on the (x) next to the Badge that you want to remove.
- Validate that the removal cannot be undone and click Yes, Delete.
Q & A Session
What is the purpose of using a Spouse connection or a Household connection?
The Spouse connection was a feature that came out with the launch of DonorDock. It was the first layer that connected two contact records. However, we rolled out relationships to households and employer’s for an additional layer that allows you to track multiple contacts to one parent record. This allows you toggle to the main record, view each individuals lifetime giving and the giving total in summary. From there you can toggle to individual records.
You would use a household to help identify that maybe a husband and a wife donate separately but would like to note how much they have given in total as a household. Or in some cases, we have families where their children are volunteers but don’t donate money. In this case it’s still important to note those contacts as being related. As we can use this information when engaging the donor, segmenting the donor, etc.
You may use the spouse relationship to identify that there is a connection between two contacts but just a primary contact gives. The spouse relationships allows you to track more information about an additional family member just at a lower level than the relationships feature.
Neither is right or wrong and is left up to your preferences and how your organization wishes to track and interact with your donors.
