constituent record customization

Rob Hawley

Hi! Rookie BB user here! We are an animal rescue in Chesapeake, VA. Opened our brick & mortar last November. I joined the team a couple of weeks ago and am learning RE NXT and the systems. I am trying to figure out how to customize my constituent records. Ideally, I want to add attributes that identify adoption information (date - animal type - breed - name), but it also needs to be stackable, like gift records for example, when we have more than one adoption by a constituent. I have been searching all of the knowledgebases with no luck…

signed - Lost & Confused ?

Dariel Dixon

@Rob Hawley Welcome to the community! In NXT, attributes are called custom fields. You can set them to use a table lookup or a variety of field types. I'd suggest that for right now. It's going to be difficult when creating an adoption with more than one constituent, as custom fields are query-able, but not as clear as predefined fields. There's no way to stack the custom fields, so your breed field may need to include dogs and cats for instance. It might be worthwhile to create separate fields for felines and canines to have smaller tables to search through.

EDIT: I just searched for your organization. I graduated high school a block away from your location. That's hilarious.

Christine Robertson

@Rob Hawley Before you create Attributes/Custom fields for this, be sure that your required reports will work with multiple attributes for a single constituent. I'm not saying that they won't - just that it is worth being certain on the front end.

Rob Hawley

@Christine Robertson Thank you! I am not even sure what that means LOL

Dariel Dixon

@Rob Hawley Attributes/custom fields have options to only allow one of a type on a record, or to allow multiples of that attribute. I think it's just a checkbox on the attribute setup.

Rob Hawley

@Dariel Dixon Thank you! Indian River? Right across the road! Y'all had a great football season last year! My son is a junior, and QB for Kempsville High School.

If I am reading your response correctly, I won't have more than one constituent for an adoption. I will have more than one adoption per constituent, so there should not be any overlaps. Just trying to figure out how to configure the constituent records to show it appropriately.

Alex Wong

@Rob Hawley
Before thinking about coding, you will find it better to think through the business need of the coding.

You mentioned constituent can have more than 1 adoption. Is adoption based on donation made? If so maybe not need to tag the constituent but the gift only

Karen Diener

@Rob Hawley:

Hi! Rookie BB user here! We are an animal rescue in Chesapeake, VA. Opened our brick & mortar last November. I joined the team a couple of weeks ago and am learning RE NXT and the systems. I am trying to figure out how to customize my constituent records. Ideally, I want to add attributes that identify adoption information (date - animal type - breed - name), but it also needs to be stackable, like gift records for example, when we have more than one adoption by a constituent. I have been searching all of the knowledgebases with no luck…

signed - Lost & Confused ?

You might want to consider using a Relationship for this information, which would be easier for multiple adoptions. If you are careful about using specific relationships and relationship types, such as “Adopter” and “Adoptee” for pet adoptions, you won't ever mix them up with people or organization relationships you might also have.

The individual adopting the pet would be a constituent, but the pets can be non-constituent relationships which means you keep your record count under control.

There are Relationship attributes that you could then potentially use to track the animal type and breed. My guess is that you have a separate tracking system for your pets, and I would strongly encourage adding an ID from that database as an attribute as well. That way you could have a cross-reference between the two systems. The pet name will be the relationship first name and last name (you will need to use the adopter's last name which will be fine) and the Relationship date from field can serve as the adoption date.

My ONLY concern about this is that Relationship attributes are not currently visible in webview. As someone pointed out, they are known as custom fields in webview. I would be a little surprised if they aren't moved to webview but hard to know when that might happen.

Rob Hawley

@Karen Diener I like the thought of this. Very new to the system, but I think I can work through these processes. Thank you so much!

Rob Hawley

@Karen Diener
I think this is the best way to track adoptions! How do you add attributes to a non-constituent in database view? I can't seem to find the path…

Rachel Bhaduri

@Rob Hawley
Hi Rob! Fellow animal welfare person here! I load adopters and their pets from our animal management system, PetPoint. Each person gets an attribute, and their pet is added as a relationship. Attribute category = Adopter, Description = type of animal, Date = adoption date. For the pet relationship, the pet gets the adopter's last name, plus the pet's first name, relationship = pet companion, reciprocal = adopter. Then I also add in pet's DOB, sex, and their animal ID from PetPoint as a note. It's so nice to have an overall pic of a donor for our fundraisers. For example, they can see Ms. Smith has donated $10,000 over her lifetime, has adopted 5 animals, we can see prospect info, actions, etc.

Feel free to reach out if you've got any questions!

Karen Diener

@Rob Hawley:

@Karen Diener
I think this is the best way to track adoptions! How do you add attributes to a non-constituent in database view? I can't seem to find the path…

All Attributes need to be set up in Config in database view first, and they would be Individual Relationship Attributes:

In this grid, the “Description” field is going to become the Attribute Category on that Relationship record. Whatever you choose for the Data Type will be in the Attribute Description field. This is how the Office Hours one would appear on a record:

I'm a strong proponent of structured data in case you need to report on it later, which means you would want to make use of a table, but I'm not sure that applies readily to your situation. Animal type makes sense as a table, and maybe breed, but it is dependent on your reporting needs. If you don't need to extract “how many shepherd / husky mixes were adopted”, then you probably don't need it to be a table entry. Tables just lend consistency to data entry so that one person doesn't add “male” while another uses “M”.

Keep asking questions if you have any!

Rob Hawley

@Karen Diener Thank you! This worked. For some reason, it didn't work yesterday, but now the attributes are populating. Guess it took the system a minute to catchup!