Recording in RE when someone is retired

Jennifer Stone
Jennifer Stone
Fourth Anniversary
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions

I'm wondering how other Organizations record when someone is retired. If we know their last employer, I would record it on the relationship record, but we don't always know that. Any ideas?

Tagged:

Comments

  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 January 2026 Monthly Challenge 2025 bbcon Attendee Badge
    Great question and an area to set a standard procedure even for recording on the relationship. Especially considering how the info can be viewed in webview records.


    I inherited a mixed bag. ?


    I have 2,000 plus records that have separate organization relationship to the organization "Retired”. When looking at record it is not always easy to determine where they retired from with multiple businesses listed.


    I have also found org relationships where it's been added at the end of their position title. I found that it's often not visible when position is lengthy and especially an issue with our phonathon partner who pulls the field but their character limit is less so they don't see the 'retired' at the end. I started transposing it to read Retired - Data Systems Senior Engineer... so 'retired' is visible. It's probably a short term fix.

    I have considered using a code along the lines of Former “Employee – retired” with a reciprocal of “Retired Employee” so when development staff are viewing in NXT it's clear.


    When you don't have a last employer for the person, don't know what other options there are but a "Retired" organization name if you want to track the info. That would be my recommendation when you have no or don't know last employer.


    Cleaning this up and standardizing unfortunately is way down my list of clean up projects.


  • Alan French
    Alan French
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    We would add an organisation relationship and use the relationship type “retired employee”, even if we don't know which company they retired from. We may just have a job title for someone so we often don't know the company name, not just for retirees, so we would enter “Not Known” in the org name field. That way it's all in the same place for reporting, regardless of whether we know the company or not.

  • Faith Murray
    Faith Murray Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply Name Dropper

    Interesting topic. I always address cleanup questions from the angle: for what purpose do we anticipate using this data? At this point, we really don't use “retired” information for any purpose aside from planned giving or major giving relationship building. So for us, a simple comment under “Notes - biographical data” is all that is needed. If we thought we might need this data for bulk list segmentation, I would probably create a “Lifestage” Attribute for it, along with other known life stages such as “parent”, “student”, or the like that might similarly affect solicitation verbiage. We do not enter a business relationship unless a business is known. As @JoAnn Strommen said, the most important factor is having a consistent policy.

Categories