Tracking multiple corporate/government teams without creating duplicates

Jeremy Dashiell

Hi there,

We are trying to figure out a best way to track multiple teams or entities from one corporation without having too many duplicates. For example our local county has a public health department and a prosecutor's office that would both be relevant groups that we would want to talk to and that we potentially receive workplace giving donations from employees in both organizations that would fall under the larger county. Any thoughts or advice for how you've handled this would be appreciated.

Christine Robertson

@Jeremy Dashiell I think more context is necessary for anyone to speak to this.

• How many people are participating?
• Does your organization have relationships with the different departments/government teams?
• How are you currently tracking this?
• How many records do you anticipate are affected by this?
  

Dariel Dixon

I think it's important to determine what you're trying to accomplish here @Jeremy Dashiell. With regards to all of those entities, it might be advantageous to create separate records. It makes giving history more clear, actions more relevant, and engagement easier. That may mean that you have 10 or so records for County XYZ, but the sheriff's office is very different than the parks and recreation department, even though the checks all come from the county.

There is a Parent organization field in database view, but I don't necessarily recommend using it. I think with regards to corporations it can be a bit difficult due to variations like chapters, branches, etc. I worked with an organization that had 7 Bank of America records for different branches. Each had a different address and set of contacts. We also had a corporate address. But we were engaging with each separately and distinctly, so it was the best way at the time.

Karen Diener

@Jeremy Dashiell I worked in a large hospital foundation that had a similar situation. Every record that could potentially send gifts or that we had a relationship with had a separate record.

We did connect the “subsidiary” organizations to the “parent” organization, but did so on the Relationships tab since the Parent Organization field was really of no value. The main reason for the relationships was to automatically soft credit the parent organization for the subsidiary organization giving, which was important for that project.

We also set up Aliases for parent organizations to help identify them as the top level, which helped when it wasn't necessarily obvious. We needed both a Regional and a National headquarters, so would have had “Walmart RHQ” and “Walmart NHQ” as Aliases on those records. It was a pretty big network, so this helped quite a bit, but may not be necessary for smaller setups where the County is fairly obvious.

Karen