Managing Spouse Phones on Primary Record

Laura Neidhold

Hello BB Community - 
Our fundraising team posed a question about the possibility of moving spouse phones from the spouse relationship record, onto the primary spouse constituent record for primary constituents when we don't know the primary's phone or email. 

I plan do this by creating a new "Spouse Phone" and "Spouse Email" phone types. 
The motivation behind moving this data is for fundraisers to be able to select the appropriate phone or email when entering actions, and for better visibility of contact information. 

I'm wondering if I'm missing anything, are there are reasons to not add this phone type? I would not add this retroactively to all existing records unless requested,  but would update our spouse phone process for new records. 

Thank you for your consideration! 

Karen Diener

It is hard to assess without knowing what tool / process you are using for bulk emailing, but I think that is where some problems may show up.

If you send bulk emails via RENXT's Email Marketing function, it will be harder to personalize them if you go this route. There are workarounds but you'll need to do more data updates on an ongoing basis.

The other issue that might cause a challenge is if one member of the couple opts out of emails. This would typically mark the constituent record as "requests no email", which would make it difficult to send email to the spouse.

Alex Wong

I would suggest you reconsider doing so.

I inherited RE that uses "Spouse" type of phone and email and it is horrendous to try to separate this.

Meaning, we are an org that uses non-constituent spouse (not specifically husband or wife), where primary is the one engage with our org and spouse is used for their partner. So Spouse Email for example would represent the partner. We have so much trouble with "women" outreach program b/c of this. So we are considering separating out each individual as constituent and use householding, but trying to "cleanly" separate spouse email into its own constituent record is going to be a headache.

if you have spouse email in the spouse record today, i would recommend you reconsider