Creating records for spouses

Katharine Cappo

We currently only have records for one spouse in a household. The secondary spouse doesn't have a record and is linked to their spouse by relationship. Therefore, we can't track event attendance, volunteer experience, or giving for the secondary spouse. I know this is not best practice and I'm curious if anyone has experience creating records for spouses and can share what the process was like. Thanks in advance!

JoAnn Strommen

@Katharine Cappo Welcome to the BB community forums.

At the orgs where I have worked we created a separate record for spouse whenever it was appropriate. As you cited, without a record you can not track volunteer positions, event attendance, can not easily direct mass communications. Examples of when we created include board/committee membership, project volunteer, event attendance, equal status (both alums), spouse wanted giving recorded in their name separate from spouse's, and a few others.

You will need to determine your organization's procedure/policy for gift entry. Will it always be on HOH record with SC to spouse or can gifts be entered on either record with SC the other? What you decide here will affect your settings/criteria when looking at lifetime giving and some other financial reports. As long as you plan for it, you can pull data you want.

IMO, you want addresses linked so updating one will update the other and you want add/sal formats that pull both names just like you would for relationships.

Noah Wilson

@Katharine Cappo
We hard credit the spouse who signed the check or who is the cardholder and then soft credit the other spouse.

When adding spouses as full constituents, you can actually directly promote a non-constituent spouse (the relationship) to a full constituent which brings the information that you already had on the relationship record to the constituent record automatically. (On the relationship record, you would go to Relationship > Add this individual as a Constituent.) You'll want to make sure that the newly promoted constituent is appropriately soft credited for any existing gifts by their spouse.

On a related note, you would also want to consider how to handle cases of remarriage. For example, consider the situation in which Mrs. X is married to Mr. X who passes away and she later marries Mr. Y. In this case, Mrs. X would retain her soft credits from Mr. X but they would not necessarily be credited to Mr. Y since he had nothing to do with them.

The last, and perhaps most important, part of this is to consider how what you do will affect things downstream like reporting or mailing (to echo what JoAnn brought up). For example, since you haven't previously had a record for each spouse, you'll want to be sure that you use head of household processing for your mailings so that you only send one letter per household rather than one to each spouse. Having a clearly defined policy regarding soft credits is also very helpful (even just in general) so that reports can be accurately pulled for things like cumulative giving and the like. Queries and exports can handle gifts with soft credits in a variety of ways: only crediting the hard credit recipient, only crediting the soft credit recipient, or crediting both.

Just to sketch out the start of a possible approach you could use when deciding how best to handle the whole adding spouse records thing:

• Define the problem and the needed/desired end state.
• Identify stakeholders involved, such as people entering the data or people using the data.
  • You will want to be sure that any changes won't unintentionally derail someone else's process and that they are properly informed of any changes they may need to make to their process.
• Identify and address any relevant policies and procedures that need to be updated/created.
  • Things like how soft credits and defined and used or how to handle cases of remarriage.
  • Impacts on reporting can also be addressed here.

Apologies for the wall of text, but hopefully it is at least somewhat helpful.

Dariel Dixon

@Katharine Cappo: I don't create a record for spouses until there's a reason for the record to be created. My organization puts all gifts under the main constituent in the household, so all gifts are on one record for the most part. Event participation is different, because non-constituent records can still show event participation as a guest. I would consider documenting why a record would be upgraded to a full constituent and follow those rules. My rules are if there is documented separate giving, or has a different relationship with the organization that is different than the main constituent.

We currently only have records for one spouse in a household. The secondary spouse doesn't have a record and is linked to their spouse by relationship. Therefore, we can't track event attendance, volunteer experience, or giving for the secondary spouse. I know this is not best practice and I'm curious if anyone has experience creating records for spouses and can share what the process was like. Thanks in advance!

Alex Wong

@Katharine Cappo
we are an org that does non-constituent spouse currently as well, and in special case we will have constituent spouse.

However, we are also evaluting constituent spouse for all going forward. First consideration is (if RE NXT) record band, all spouse having their own constituent record will surely up your constituent count where you then have to pay for more record band. Then it is reporting, mailing, etc, which will all need to be specifically handled.

Why do this? well in today's world of more “individualized” communication, email is definitely a problem with non-constituent spouse. Secondly, it is event registration, which makes tracking spouse attendance very difficult over multiple events using non-constituent spouse. Fundraising effort around women (generally women spouse is the non-constituent) is very difficult too.

I do wish Blackbaud does bulit more head of household processing into mailing and reporting, but they do not currently, in order to probably handle, you will have to “build” around it using various attribute, or build custom reporting using power bi (for example).

Alex Wong

@Katharine Cappo
Another consideration is giving, as others have stated, Blackbaud does not have a good mean of this to be honest, but custom giving report can be.

Say for example, John Smith (husband) and Mary Smith (wife) owns Smith Foundation.

John Smith direct giving $1000 (soft credit $1K to Mary)
Mary Smith direct giving $500 (soft creidt $500 to John)
Smith Foundation direct giving $5000 (soft credit $5K to John and Mary)

If you run report by “direct credit” (in my opinion definitely not correct)
John total giving is $1K
Mary total giving is $500
Foundation giving is $5K

Assuming you run report by “soft credit”
John total giving is $5,500
Mary total giving is $6,000
Foundation giving is $0

Assuming you run report by direct and soft
John total giving is $6,500
Mary total giving is $6,500
Foundation giving is $5,000

None of the 3 option above are good in my opinion, it should be:
John and Mary Smith Family total giving is $6,500

however, in order to get that single $6,500, you need to build a custom report (i.e. Power BI)

Christine Robertson

@Katharine Cappo When I worked at a K12, I needed all parents to have their own constituent records because of the way that the SIS enrollment data came through. In order to help with the soft credits in reporting, I linked my RE7 reports to a query that only pulled the HOH and that would remove all pass-through foundations (DAFs, etc.) as those were the only two scenarios where our practices included soft credits. I then pulled all RE7 reports with the soft credit applied to both (since both parties would not be included in my report).