I'm curious to know how others handle a household record when 1 or both spouse/partners are marked deceased.

Lisa Dziepak
Lisa Dziepak
Ninth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Altru® General Discussions

I would love to hear some feedback on handling households with member changes. When one of the spouse/partners has died do you mark the other primary and change the household name to only reflect the remaining constituent? Do you also remove the deceased from the household, but maintain the history? If both spouses are deceased what if anything do you do to the household record? I recently pulled a constituent list with HH rolled up and was surprised to find many of the Primary HH members marked deceased where another spouse/partner exists that is not marked deceased.

Tagged:

Comments

  • Ruth Droescher
    Ruth Droescher
    Third Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    We typically dissolve a household when one (or both) members are no longer active for whatever reason. This will automatically make the household inactive and change any current members to former, with an end date matching the dissolution date. We don't necessarily remove the spouse relationship, but we do update it to reflect one as deceased and the other as widow/widower in the relationship. We've debated whether or not we should maintain this as the ‘spouse’ relationship in Altru (having the check-box checked on the details) but ultimately found that it is helpful to see in the constituent summary area - otherwise this gets buried a little in the relationship tab. We do, of course, update the spouse relationship if one member remarries, and create a new household for that relationship. Keep in mind though, dissolving the household doesn't necessarily update relationships, which might also impact soft crediting defaults. We typically review these as part of the deceasing process as well as check to make sure name formats, etc are all being updated to reflect the individual rather than the old household.

  • Lisa Dziepak
    Lisa Dziepak
    Ninth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1

    @Ruth Droescher Thanks for your reply, sorry to be so late in responding. This is helpful, I do change relationship types to reflect widow/widower, are you saying you have a relationship type of deceased? If so, I hadn't thought of that. My organization seems to want to see the deceased person's name in the HH, but I don't like that. If we are mailing to a household record we could accidentally include that person's name. I think I need to push back on that. For the time being I have put “deceased” in parentheses after the deceased person's name.

    We haven't been dissolving HH for divorce, just leaving the primary member as the one who notified us and removing the other spouse. When dissolving the HH, does that affect any of the recognition credits? It may be cleaner to dissolve it.
    Thanks again for your reply!


Categories