Hi,
I have groups of volunteers who all are part of the same community. I want to create relationships between them; each member of each group to every other member of the group. Can this be done in an import or do I need to do them one at a time?
@Sarah Thompson What do you hope to achieve by linking everyone to each other? It sounds like a lot of work to do and to maintain.
If you want to see them as a group, you might want to consider a record for “Volunteer Group ABC” and then link each record to this organization record. IMO, it would be a lot cleaner, easier to create and easier to maintain.
To the best of my knowledge you would need to go to each record and create a relationship from A to B. You can reciprocate by clicking yes for B to A. Then A to C, etc. If you're talking a large # it could be quite time consuming I think.
@Sarah ThompsonYou can do this with an import, don't need to do them manually.
I recommend what JoAnn said, unless there are some reason you need the volunteer relating to each other, which you can use import.
if you got volunteer A,B,C,D, then your import will have these rows, in math, that's just calculating combination
A relates to B (which also means B relates to A using recipricol)A relates to CA reletes to DB reletes to CB reletes to DC reletes to D
@Alex WongThanks Alex, it sounds like it could be a complicated import, but does give me hope that I might not need to do it all manually.
@Sarah Thompsonthe import isn't particular a complicated import, the “complicatedness” is creating the combination of Constituent Import ID, which if you google it, there may be tools that does combination for you based on a list of values you have.
@Sarah ThompsonIt's not necessarily that complicated of an import but just a lot of relationships/IDs to deal with. If there are 15 people in your group, that's over 100 relationships.
So, I'll ask again, ? what is your end goal with having the records linked in this way? Would one volunteer community group do what you need? Are these relationships something that will have any value in 3 years, 10 years, etc.?
@Sarah Thompson
If you just want to be able to identify the members of a group you could either link all the records to a single record or create an attribute.
For example, you could create a record for “Volunteer Community A” then link each volunteer to that record as a relationship. Then you could see everyone in that community without linking them directly to each other. This is a much simpler import.The other option is to add a constituent attribute. Then you could create a query to pull all records with that attribute to get the list of members.
@Sarah Thompson I would also do it the way the others have suggested, i.e. linking individuals to a single record but not to each other. Don't forget that you can use the relationship tree to see who is connected to each other via another constituent!
