Managing a family of prospects

Therese Morris

How do you manage a family of prospects as one prospect so counts as one person in a portfolio? Fake family record? Maybe assign family members to a stewardship person or "Family" fundraiser?

For example John Smith Jr. is the key prospect managed by top fundraiser. Other family members John Sr. (handles $$), spouse, siblings, children should not be assigned to other fundraisers, but it happens.

Activity reports on number of people actively managed in a portfolio. If all family members are assigned to top fundraiser it inflates his portfolio.

Aldera Chisholm

Whenever possible, I prefer to keep all the family members as relationships instead of constituents - unless we have interactions with them separately, but of course that doesn't work in lots of scenarios.


We do like to have each of them assigned to the fundraiser because it makes it easier for our gift entry person, but yes, it does skew reports. I created a Prospect Classification of Related to Prospect so I can easily exclude them from Lists. Another option is create a second fundraiser type that is used for all the family except the primary person, and you could pretty easily exclude that fundraiser type in reports where you want more accurate counts.


Looking forward to everyone else's tips on this!

Dan Snyder

We basically do what Aldera Chisholm‍ mentioned in assigning them all to the same fundraiser, with a prospect status of "Relationship to Primary". This helps in situations where our fundraisers are asked to review an email list where all the family members might be listed, it allows the fundraiser to remove all family members rather than having to remember all the associated names.


However, I like the idea of assigning the non-primary constituents to a "Family" Fundraiser so a Work Center in NXT would not show inflated numbers.