Relationships: Connecting The Dots Around A Constituent

Published

To enhance your fundraising efforts and interactions, you can track detailed information about a constituent's relationships with other individuals and organization, such as family, friends, and employers. The more relationships you track, the more connections between your constituents become evident, similar to a profile on LinkedIn.

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On a constituent's record, you can view their related individuals and organizations under Relationships. For each individual or organization, you can view how they're related to the constituent — such as Wife or Employer — and, if applicable, when the relationship occurred. With this information, you can:

Give your interactions with the constituent more meaning and context.
Identify prospective donors and volunteers.
Track potential leads to help cultivate giving — from both the constituent and the related individual or organization!

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To save a new relationship to the constituent, select Add, and choose whether to add an Individual relationship or Organization relationship. When you add a constituent's relationship with an individual or organization, you can save details including:

How the constituent and the individual or organization are related to each other
The dates of the relationship, such as for employment or with an ex-spouse
Other pertinent details you find important

For a relationship between an individual and an organization, you can also track:

Whether the individual acts as a contact at the organization
The individual's position or job title at the organization

To help avoid duplicate data entry, we recommend you first search for the related individual or organization when you add their relationship to the constituent. If they aren't in your database, you can select Add (the plus sign) to create their record. When you add a new individual or organization, you can save their name, contact information, and any demographic details.

For more information, check out the Relationships Help.

News Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT® Blog 08/17/2017 1:05pm EDT

Added by Steve Stegelin

3 Comments

Mansoor Niazi Sep '19

Are there any updates on this issue? It seems like the question was asked in 2017, but even now in 2019 I still see the same problem.

Jarod Bonino Aug '17

Hey Bill!

To clarify, this feature is adding relationship records (or what is known in RE7 as "non-constituent records"), not full Constituent records. We are working on the ability to add full Constituent records now and will eventually give users a choice between adding relationship records or constituent records in this workflow. We fully recognize the continued need to support spouse, contact, and guest records (to name a few) that are not full on constituents, so there is nothing here indicative of a drastic change to future direction of NXT (not everyone will have to be a Constituent).

For now you are correct. To add a new record while adding a relationship that you want to be a full constituent in RE you can take one of two paths:

1. Create the Constituent record in database view and then add the relationship (in web view if you'd prefer)
2. Create the Relationship record while adding the relationship in web view, and then go to database view to promote them to a full Constituent record.

The work we are doing now on "Add constituent" and "Promote to constituent" will close the gap on these "two-view workflows" in coming weeks.

I hope that helps!

Thanks,
Jarod Bonino
Product Manager, Raiser's Edge

Bill Connors Aug '17

Steve, there doesn't appear to be an option when adding these new relationships whether to add them as constituents or non-constituent relationships only. Correct? Which are they added as? Does this indicate the future direction of RE NXT where everyone is/doesn't have to be a constituent, especially in a world where we're charged by constituent count? (My testing indicates they are only added as non-constituent relationships, but I wanted to confirm. Presumably to add a new relationship that should be a constituent would still require for now the new constituent to first be added to the DB view?) And finally, presumably these web view-added relationships synch with the database view? Thanks.