Do you have your own organization in RE as a Constituent?

Patrick Kelleher-Calnan

Right now the only ways I'm tracking the dates people were Board Members or Staff is through Constituent Code dates or constituent notes. I don't particularly like doing it this way. For one thing I don't want to have to use dates when querying on Constituent Code, especially since that's the sort of thing users might like to query on and I'd like to keep it simple. It occurred to me I could add my org as a Constituent and use relationship records to track people's tenure as Board Members or Staff and just use Constituent Code to track their current relationship to us.

Has anyone experimented with anything like this? I could see it getting becoming a bit of a goofy solution to my problem…

Dariel Dixon

@Patrick KelleherCalnan I think it's a good idea, however it will create a bunch of relationships. It might make the relationship tile so populated that it's no longer very usable.

Patrick Kelleher-Calnan

@Dariel Dixon Thanks! Yes, that makes sense, it would create an awful lot of relationship records. If properly documented so that future users expect that to me the case it should be acceptable.

roger berg

@Patrick KelleherCalnan Hi Patrick-

Yes, I have our organization in RE as a constituent. But more to your point, I have the Board and also the Board Subcommittees as constituents as well. I'm not as interested in adding all staff to the organization record because I have a constituent code to track that. But it's very useful to me to be able to pull a list of committee members (and to see former members as well). As far as cluttering up the relationship tile, I have very few relationship records on any organization that are contacts. In NXT you can check the box on the relationship tile to only show contacts, and in RE you can use Legend Options on the relationship tab to color code specific relationship types to make it easier to see certain ones (like contacts).

Alan French

@Patrick KelleherCalnan we also have a constituent record for our organisation, I've not noticed any problems. We have a constituent code of “internal department" which we can use to exclude it and any other departments which for various reasons have warranted their own record.

If you already have non-constituent relationships between constituents and your organisation, you might just be able to promote the non-constituent to a full constituent? Or even having it as a non-constituent would still allow you to report on those relationships to a limited degree if you decided you didn't need a full constituent record for your org, you'd just only be able to query on it from the employee's perspective, not from the org's.

Patrick Kelleher-Calnan

@roger berg Thank you Roger. It sounds like you're doing something similar to what I'm considering. Appreciate the feedback.

Madeleine Holdsworth

@Patrick KelleherCalnan
At my former organization, we did just that. Used the Relationships to track the Board Member relationships. It worked really well. We also avoided dating the Constituent Codes…too messy. However, we did not use for staff relationships. We attempted it and it was a nightmare trying to keep up with adding/removing staff members!

Madeleine Holdsworth

@Patrick KelleherCalnan
I would also add that in the Board Relationship, we used the Date From/To (as opposed to in the constituent code). We also capture when a member leaves the board in relationships (Date From = Date To of the Board r'ship), with no dates in the Constituent Code. We then change the Constituent Code to Former Board Member.

Patrick Kelleher-Calnan

@Madeleine Holdsworth Thanks Madeleine. That is one reason I was interested in setting it up this way: tracking Board Member dates w/out needing to mess with dates on Constituent Codes.

Madeleine Holdsworth

@Patrick KelleherCalnan
I'm not a fan of dated Constituent Codes! In my experience, it causes too many problem, particularly that they're usually not updated.