Relationship Contacts Solutions?

Jennifer Borri

Has anyone customized or configured a new solution for capturing relationship contacts? If so, we'd love to know what you have done. The OOB functionality isn't really working for us for several reasons including:
1. Primary contact - we have different primary contacts based on the type of contact, but we can only choose one primary contact for an organization. We use this as our mailing contact, but would love to expand this to indicate primary contacts for different contact types. (Corporate partnerships, matching gifts, advocacy, major gifts, etc., etc.)

2. Different workflows depending on where the relationship was added - constituent add forms vs. relationship add form

3. Business contact info being added (or removed) to individual constituent record in different ways depending on different workflows

4. Data quality clean up for relationship contact changes is cumbersome due to the above

5. Constituent merge issues with individual records who are a primary contact - we have to remove this before we can merge and then put them back (we believe this is an OOB merge bug, but don't see anything about it in the KB. We'll be filing a ticket with BB support shortly.)

Peggy Parviainen

Sorry for the late reply (I was looking for something regarding relationship contacts and came across your question). We discourage the use of the 'primary' contact for the exact reasons you outlined - we don't have a single definition of what a primary contact is, as everyone uses the records for different purposes and one department's primary contact at an org will be different from another department's. We ended up creating concatenated lists of contact types to allow contact to be more than one type, and then use contains in our queries. I hope you haven't been waiting three years for such a disappointing answer. If you've found a better solution in the interim, I'd love to hear it!