Couple records, soft credits, addressee/salutation policies, and lists

Kate Leach

I've been trawling through these boards and finding lots of helpful tidbits, but just not the full scope of what I think I need to understand...


I inherited an RE 7 setup, which we transitioned last year to NXT (love it). One of the things that has most confounded me about the system is our legacy policy of having one constituent record per household with a non-constituent spouse as needed. As a secondary school with an important parent population, the difficulties this raises almost weekly as we move the institution away from a heavy reliance on print communications have been pretty staggering.


Therefore, I'm strongly in favor of moving toward a constituent-per-person policy, at least in the case of all parents, and as helpful for friends, etc. I *think* that in order to do this, we'd need to implement a clear gift crediting policy, and also sort out what I think is a muddled approach to primary addressee and salutation as well.


So:

1. On soft credits, at my previous school, we had a complicated system of legal and recognition credit. A $5K gift from the Names would be entered as:

John Name - Recognition Credit $5K, Legal Credit, $2.5K

Sue Name - Recognition Credit $5K, Legal Credit, $2.5K


If they'd paid via a DAF, recognition on either would be $5K, and legal would be $0.

It sounds to me like we only have soft credit as an option in RE, and the thing to do would be to soft-credit whichever spouse is not HOH. Yes? And in pulling annual report lists, we would pull HOH only, but with the annual report salutation to acknowledge both. Is that what people do?


2. Currently, our default primary addressee is "Mr. and Mrs. Name" and our primary salutation is "John and Sue." This has led to a number of other custom salutations for when we need to name a person individually (such as a nametag). You can imagine my headache. Also at my previous institution, we had individual and joint addressees and salutations on every record (as needed), and we dispensed with titles. So John Name would have:

Primary Addressee: John Name

Primary Salutation: John

Joint Addressee: John Name and Sue Name

Joint Salutation: John and Sue


Is that also in line with RE best practice? As we split records, I'm noting that we're going to need to redo almost everyone's primary name information, so I want to make sure I don't change it to something equally problematic.


Finally, 3. Right now, if I have an event with trustees and their spouses, I can pull the trustees, with nametag 1 (trustee) and nametag 2 (the spouse). With split records, how do you pull a known list of constituents PLUS their spouses? (May be insanely simple in RE, but I'm thinking mainly here of NXT, which more of us in the office use.)


Thanks!

Kate

Karen Diener

Hi Kate,


I like the way you have compiled all of this in to one post, since all of these different components are interrelated.


For starters, I have NO problems with soft credits and married couples having separate records.  I generally recommend that they start as one record, but split the non-constituent spouse off as soon as you need to.  I was with a school and each parent had their own record because each parent needed a separate account when they had NetCommunity.  It ended up making things much easier to track even attendance, committee membership, or volunteer engagement.  I never once had a problem pulling elaborate recognition lists for the annual report, or for numerous donor walls and campaign recognition situations.


I don't quite understand item #1 and splitting the "legal credit" between spouses.  If John signs the check - even if both names are on the check - it is entered on his record and Sue gets full soft credit.  I think that trying to divide it in half in any way is asking for trouble since you'll never be able to represent the giving from them as a couple.  There are two main schools of thought on entering gifts from DAFs.  One is to enter the gift on the DAF record and give complete soft credit to each individual of a couple.  Another is presented by Bill Connors and can be found in this presentation.  Whichever one you choose, just be consistent.


As for addressees and salutations - while at a school, I had multiple ones that I tracked as well.  There is no right or wrong when it comes to which is primary and which is an additional one, but again - be consistent.  I've worked with organizations where the Primary was for a couple, and if an individual one was needed it was set up as an additional.  I've also worked with organizations where the Primary was always for an individual and additional ones were set up to account for married couples.  Just keep them audited and correct.  And try very hard NOT to mark them as editable!


For nametags, do you set them up as an additional addressee or salutation, or do you format them within the event record?  We found that we saved A LOT of time by NOT formatting them in either place, and by exporting individual name fields on our event list.  But that was compared to someone going in to the participant record in RE and selecting the "nametag text".  It shouldn't be hard to export nametags for trustees and spouses if they are all properly registered for the event.  And by "properly registered" I mean that the trustee and their spouse have separate constituent records and are each registered for the event.


There is, of course, a little bit of "play" in most everything above, but that's a pretty good representation on some guidelines that I start with.


Good luck!!


Karen

Karintha Marshall

Thank you Karen Diener‍ for linking the Bill Connors presentation,  it's tremendously useful in framing this conversation and the things to consider!

Karen Diener

He's pretty awesome, and it has been great to get to know him over the years!

Dariel Dixon

I'm just here to echo what Karen Diener‍ said.  There's no right or wrong way to these practices; consistency is the key here.  Whatever way you decide to proceed, just make sure it's consistent.  Each organization has idiosyncrasies in it's constituent base, so they may do things slightly differently, but as long as there's some constant in the data entry, it should not matter.

JoAnn Strommen

Karen Diener‍ covered it well and ditto Dariel Dixon‍. 


Regarding changing your primary add/sal, once you truly have decided you need to change this can be done through global changes.  Before beginning changes, I would export file with name, ID and all current add/sals and if editable. That will give you a reference for the unique, editable ones. 


At my previous org we had list of formats on every record. If they didn't come in as records were added, I could just run each Global Change to add the formats we needed.