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Non-Constituent Organizational Records

Ellen Callahan

Hi all,

We are in the middle doing some serious data cleanup to make sure everything is consistent in our database. In the past, a business may have been added as a non-constituent relationship record multiple times to multiple constituent records. For example, 20 constituents might work for Bank of America. Rather than having one non-constituent Bank of America with specific contact information detailed in the relationship for each individual, Bank of America was created as a non-constituent organizational record 20 times.

I was just wondering if anyone experienced the same issues and if there was any advice on how to expedite this type of data cleanup.

Thank you!

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Comments

Alan French

There is a Nonconstituent Merge Utility available under the plugins section in RE (I think this comes included as standard, but I may have had to download and install it separately. Can't remember!)

I've never used it though so not sure how easy/flexible it is to use.

There's a Knowledgebase article about it here:

Tina Pappas

@Ellen Bartlett I was just looking into this myself and came across the Nonconstituent Merge Utility. Here the KB article.

JoAnn Strommen

@Ellen Bartlett we have this issue as well but my concern on merging is that constituents work at branches of the companies all over the US. They are not all at one address and I don't want to lose which city/state they are located at.

Ellen Callahan

@Alan French Thank you! This is helpful.

Ellen Callahan

@JoAnn Strommen Definitely. From testing the Non-Constituent Merge Utility, the contact information, i.e. different business addresses, that are created in the relationship between an individual and organizational record is unchanged so this utility has actually been very helpful. For example, if we had three individuals and three separate Bank of America non-constituent relationships, and I used the non-constituent merge utility, the unique relationship business information between the individual and Bank of America non-constituent record remains. We just no longer have three separate Bank of America non-constituent records. And if Bank of America needed to become a constituent that is also okay because again, that relationship information remains unique.

However, I think individual non-constituent records are a bit trickier. If I was to have seven non-constituent John Smiths in our database, I wouldn't use the non-constituent merge utility unless I was absolutely positive all seven were the same John Smith. Otherwise, if John Smith needed to become a constituent he would have relationships, or event participations, to seven different people, or different events, he is not actually related to or participated in, if that makes sense?

I am still getting the hang of using this utility, but for our big organizational records that are in the database hundreds of times as non-constituents, it has been very helpful!

Ellen Callahan

@Tina Pappas Thank you! This is helpful.

Christine Cooke

@Ellen Bartlett It is tricky, as mentioned, because you have Orgs that have multiple locations/addresses and you do not want to lose that info.

Are you going to keep those Orgs as non-constituent records? When I've done cleanup on this area I have made the Org a constituent and then linked all the employees. But - you also have to decide how you are going to deal with Orgs that have more than one location. Two choices, either make one constituent record and add all the different addresses to that one record and link the correct address to the individual - or make constituent records for each of the locations (if the are more than one employee) and link the employees.

The thinking behind making all of Orgs into constituent records being that you can open the record and see how many of the folks in your community are employed there and what they do without having to juggle reports.

I did not use a utility, I just had a spreadsheet I'd exported that listed everyone and then worked my way down the list. Which was very helpful in finding dupes because different folks through the years had used different abbreviations or misspelled some Org names.

Having all possible aliases and former names on an org record is very important. ?