importing/creating new constituents

I suppose some of this would depend on how your organisation handles constituents generally - whether single records for a family or a couple are ok etc.

• I'd ask the person who gave the list to separate out the organisations - either to put them on another list or organise the list so they were at the top/bottom.
• For where both spouse names are together, our policy is that each person should have their own record - so that'd be one record for each spouse. I'd probably ask the person giving me the list to do this.
• For "the Smith Family," type records, I'd ask for more information - the first name of at least one of the family members (perhaps a main contact for that family) and then that's just going to be a single person's constituent record - perhaps there would be an addressee or salutation that would be "The Smith family" if we were to address them that way in correspondence.

Additionally, I'd ask them to check that these records weren't already in the database and would need to know why we were adding these people and organisations - mostly because it doesn't sound like the data quality is so great from what you've said!


Maybe for future use, I'd give them a spreadsheet with the columns of the minimum data that we require clearly marked out, if they need to do this sort of thing again? 

We leave these as individual records. A couple is also an "Individual" so I have no problem with an Individual records covering multiple people. We do not give couples individual records unless they specifically request to be receipted separately.


If we cannot complete the missing information we 

• Put Smith in the surname fields and leave first name blank.
• Add a suffix of "Family" and another of "and family".
• Select as addressee of "The Smith Family" or "Mr Smith and family" if we know one of the names
• Select a salutation of "Friends".

This works very well.


Also, sometimes we do not have a surname but have a first name, until we get a surname we use a full stop as a placeholder. That way if the wrong addressee salutation is chosen at least the letter says "Lanetta ." instead of "Lanetta Unknown" or something similar.