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.
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.
You have two contacts you’ve created as spouses. You can create a Household relationship from the Spouse tab in an individual contact record.
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.
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.