Changing all non-constituents to constituents

Michelle Moses

Currently, all of our couples have records where the female is the constituent, and the spouse is the non-constituent. We are an all girls school, grades 6-12. We are going to change this and make all non-constituents, constituents and link them together. Looking for any negatives on doing this. I know a lot of positives. One issue I am concerned about is entering gifts/pledges. Is there a way to automatically split each gift entered between the 2 records, instead of using soft credit? Or will this be a manual process, splitting every gift in half and entering it on each record? This has been a suggestion by someone in my office so if a divorce happens, the gifts will be split 50/50. My next concern is, how do we quickly look at the household giving total when the gifts are split on 2 different records? And how to process pledges and pledge payments when all is split? I would love any advice from those who currently have their database set up with each married couple being their own constituent. I know this is great for tracking specific information for each person, especially for our fundraisers. I am not against it but just when it comes to gift processing, and if we really want to go with splitting everything 50/50. I welcome any advice and comments! -Michelle

Dariel Dixon

What is the goal of this project?  It could possibly skew your reporting on your gift numbers, especially if you are looking at any soft credits.  And you are artificially increasing your number of constituents.  


I'm super curious as why this idea came about.  It could be quite time intensive, and I don't know if the benefits will outweigh the costs.


In regards to the divorce situation, I don't think the gifts have to be split 50/50 at all.  I think here is where you can use soft credits to determine the giving history. 

Marie Stark

I agree with Daniel. There would not be an easy way to determine total giving without getting the totals from both records.

I'm also not sure how you would acknowledge these gift without doing double work.

Bill Connors

I am strongly opposed to making all spouses constituents.  That is not the way RE was designed to be used.  I can only think of three possible positive and lots of negatives:  normally in fundraising we think of a couple as a single fundraising entity.  All of the following things can't easily be shared, and this isn't a complete list:  Actions, Notes, everything on the Prospect tab in the db view, most of the Relationships tab, Attributes, etc.  I would absolutely not divide the gifts in half between two records - I know there is another system that does that automatically when both are alums, but RE was absolutely not designed to do that and you shouldn't do that in RE.  I'm curious to hear what your "lots of positives" are to making every spouse a constituent.  In my experience, BB staff continue to give conflicting guidance to us on this and can't make up their minds themselves as a company to deliver a consistent answer that makes sense, so be careful about making this decision because "some at BB told me to," especially if you're in Education.

Nicole Holt

We promoted all of our nonconstituents 8 years ago when moving our email service to NetCommunity. We have since changed email services and I am still cleaning it up (every time I think I am finally finished with the soft credit cleanup, I seem to find one more). We have since changed practice to only have people become constituents if there is a compelling reason (specifically engagement). I would not recommend and wish I could go back in time to tell less-experienced me that this idea needed more vetting.

Brenda Ryther

I agree with all comments in support of NOT making each spouse a constituent. I'm not sure I see where there are any or "alot" of positives to doing so.

We are a high school, with the primary constituents being the alum, Board of Director member, current parent, student or "Friend" (for one time gifts or engagement).  If there is already an existing record for each, I link them but otherwise they are on one record. The spouse only has their own record created in the event of their spouse passing away or divorce.  When a spouse passes away, I have it set up in configuration that a new record is created and all gifts are automatically soft credited to the surviving spouse .  In a divorce, I soft credit all prior gifts when I create the new spouse record before the spouse is removed from the main record. Once that is done, the person that made the actual donation is the record the gift goes on, with no more soft crediting.  It's a very simple process and I have never found a reason that a spouse would need their own record. I think that would lead to alot of duplication, inaccurate reporting and constituent history. 

Jahna Balk

I guess I am coming in on the opposite side of the crowd on this one. In our case, splitting the records and setting up the automatic soft crediting was absolutely the best thing to do. All of the parents were in RE under the father's record and many of our volunteers, including trustees, are the moms. It was particularly an issue for alumni who were parents. Coding and messaging were not on the correct person. So, we split the records of current parents, trustees, and faculty and staff.


I've had no problems adjusting my financial reporting to this process. It makes donor stewardship better and more accurate, and makes the events module function better, as well, because we can link participants directly to their records. Add to that that our K-12 software operates on a single record system and it made the most sense for the processing of parent updates, including separations, divorces, etc.


In fact, it has worked so well that we're considering splitting other non-constituent records, as well!


PS, we used a supervised automation for the record split, so it wasn't nearly as work-intensive a process as we originally thought.