University Departments in Altru

Michael Martin

Good afternoon!

We are new to Altru and are looking to see what the best practice might be for handling University records in Altru. Example: We currently have the following orgs that came over from during our conversion:

Western Michigan University
WMU College of Aviation
WMU School of Medicine
WMU Department of Theatre

… and several more.

Would it be best to keep them as separate orgs that WMU is the parent org of? Or just have one org for WMU that has employees with a relationship to that org?

Thank you in advance for any tips you might have!

KAS Shannon Knight

@Michael Martin, I've seen organizations do it both ways – sometimes within the same organization!

It really depends on how you want to use the information. Will you be sending mailings directly to or are there reservations for specific departments? Do you have direct contact with some departments but not others? If yes to any of these, it probably makes sense to keep them separate and relate them to the overarching WMU parent record.

If, instead, you're contacting individuals associated with the departments but you really only care that they're at WMU, you could merge the organization records and just have one WMU record for all relationships. That said, you may need to make sure the department is part of the individual's mailing address or part of the individual's title in the employment relationship, something like Professor, Dept. of Education.

Whichever way you choose, you can always query on WMU relationships, whether it's a 1st degree or 2nd degree or more. For (an over-the-top) example, you might want a list of parents of grad students in the WMU Psychology Department which is a subsidiary of WMU. It's doable – just a matter of digging in the relationship table structure to find the right fields.

There's really no right or wrong answer, it's whatever works best for you. ?