Are Organizations As Constituents Right For You Right Now?

Robert Kiser

New software functionality that can influence the performance of a solution presents users with difficult questions to answer. Should we adopt it right away? Should we wait to see what others do? Can we use it without compromising the integrity of our data? Luminate Online’s Organization Gifts feature users with these types of questions.   The key sections that have been updated include:

• Hierarchies: Previously, TeamRaiser allowed for just three levels of hierarchy within an organizational structure. TeamRaiser now offers unlimited levels of hierarchy for structuring and reporting purposes and allow roll ups across those hierarchies.
• Contacts: Earlier versions of TeamRaiser only allowed for one contact per organization. TeamRaiser now allows you to associate unlimited contacts with an organization record. Contact types have been introduced to differentiate between those contacts. 
• Contact Info: We now allow organizations to record addresses, email addresses and telephone numbers. Now that Organizations can have multiple contacts, you can record subsequent addresses in the address of the contact which you will be emailing.
• TeamRaiser: National and regional structures have been maintained for reporting purposes, but you can now have unlimited local companies as well as levels of local companies that can be rolled up for reporting purposes. All levels have been established as first class entities.
• DeDupe: You can now merge duplicate organization records in TeamRaiser and Luminate Online.

All of these changes are meant to focus on the expansion of organizations and hierarchies. We have added the ability to record more information on an organizational record within TeamRaiser. Addresses, telephone numbers, notes, and multiple contacts have been incorporated as well, meaning that you can record interactions with organizations in the form of notes and use Luminate Online to email your contacts within that organization. If you currently use the software in this fashion, then adopting Organization Gifts will give you more capabilities than you have today along with first class functionality.


If your organization uses constituents to record interactions with organizations but never receives gifts except through contacts, then the Organization Gifts should be a good fit.  If you currently use TeamRaiser Company functionality in TeamRaiser and want to maintain them as a first class entity, then these changes will apply automatically and you’ll have some nice new functionality out of the box.  

Nicole Tucker

Hi Robert, I have a question about MultiCenter. Are there any plans to enhance org records so that orgs are center aware and information about transactions made by an org to a center/chapter will be confidential, or not shared between centers? I'm running into an issue with one of my clients, where the chapters each have their own center. The chapters do not want to share the donation/transaction information with each other. Right now they can see everything.

Brent Heatherington

Thanks for your great question Nichole! At this time, there are no plans to make Organization gifts “center aware”. We know multi-center is important and we’ll be evaluating requests like this as we focus our attention on building the next version of Luminate Online!