Adding Committee Members as Custom Fields

Rachael Kusak

Hi everyone, I am trying to figure out the best way to add our annual committee members in RENXT using custom fields. We have multiple committees and positions such as Chair and Vice Chair. In the past, it looks like it was entered as "Committee Member" as the custom field, the specific committee name as the description and using a table, and then adding the date "1/1/202x" in the date section. Showing 1/1/202x does not look the cleanest to me but I am wondering if anyone found a better way to do this or does this work for pulling queries, etc.? My thought is to make a custom field for each specific committee, the year in the description and the position such as chair can be entered in the comments. But I have also read that the custom fields are supposed to be more broad. Would love any thoughts on what has worked for you!

Joe Moretti

We do exactly how you are doing and it works fine for us. You can always use the comments section to state the date range they were the member. I suggest not making each various committee a custom field then using using the date in the description. In the long run it will get to be too much and messy.

Don Burrhus

We find the Custom fields Comments to be too limiting as we want to track when people roll on and off of ten different 'Advisory Boards' (essentially committees) as well as their roles on said Board. We have their status in a Custom Field ('Alumni Board', 'Former Alumni Board' etc., so this leads to twenty different possibilities in the Custom Field value.) As more detail is needed than Comments can handle and this stuff needs to be queryable, we also track their roles and time period(s) on Boards as Relationships to Constituent records that represent each of the individual named boards. That way we can track their time(s) served on a given Board, titled Roles on the given board and notes indicating anything unusual about them joining/departing a board. This makes querying and histories possible. For our two most preeminent boards, we also add Constituency Codes for current and former so that they are very visible in the RENXT record header. Yes, tracking this in three places is not great. We too spent a lot of time looking for simpler/better ways to handle this while still meeting the various needs.

Art Bryman

I'd suggest using Volunteer, Membership, Relationships, or even Events for this.

Dariel Dixon

@Rachael Kusak, your structure needs to match your reporting. Will you need to report on memberships as a whole, or on specific members. I don't know if it will be worth the clutter to create custom fields for every committee, but you know better than we would.

@Art Bryman's suggestion of using membership or volunteer modules is a good one if a) you have those modules and b) it's not being used for anything else.

Rachael Kusak

Thank you so much everyone!