Children in household

Amy Morley

I would like to hear how other organizations handle young children in Raiser's Edge. Unfortunately, they cannot be put in a household with parents (only spouses can be in a household).


I suggest connecting them to a parent or parents, and then mark them Do Not Solicit until they get older.


Any other ideas? 


Thanks!

Amy

Mary Schultz

We have quite a few children in our database as we get a lot of middle- and high-school aged volunteers.  We mark them with a specific Child constituent code in addition to relating them to their parents' record(s) if in the database and marking them as Do Not Solicit.  Birthdates are really handy if you have them.  I have a maintenance query I run periodically to update Child records that are now over the age of 18.

Tom Klimchak

We don't have a lot of children so we do our best NOT to enter them at all if possible.  We have an attribute to keep track of "number of children" and we have Family notes, but we think the cost of keeping all those child records is too high.  We might think different if we had a lot of teen volunteers.


If you ARE going to have a lot of child/teen records and you want to track households you *could* do something wonky like this: 

Create an Attribute/Custom Field called "Household" that uses the Datatype Constituent Name.  In each child record you would create an attribute that links back to the head of household record.  


In this way you've sort of created your own household tracking.  We use this for a slightly different situation.  It's wonky, but it IS a bit easier to export data out using relationship records.  

Vanessa Scott

@Amy Morley at our University we have parents that are Alumni and now the children are. So would it make reporting better to link the addresses so they don't show as duplicates on reports?

Austen Brown

@Amy Morley - I have always done something similar to what @Mary Schultz has suggested, with applying the “Do Not Solicit” solicit code until the child turns 18.