Households

Brent Wilhelm · July 2023

Hi,

We are new to Blackbaud and I am trying to learn more about Households. I have looked at the 2 knowledgebase articles, but am left wanting more details. We have imported all of our data and have noticed the household checkbox in the address edit area. We are wondering what the purpose of the Household address is and if it is important to us. Can anyone elaborate on it's use, why we may or may not want to use it, or point me to a resource that better explains it purpose.

Thanks

Brent

Lindsey Bryant · July 2023

@Brent Wilhelm
The “Household” checkbox essentially is a way for you to link an address on one record to another. Lets say you have a student and two parents and all three of them have this box checked. When you update the students address, it will update the parents records as well.

Bryna Gleich · July 2023

@Brent Wilhelm

Have you seen these yet? They aren't KB links.

David Gillespie · July 2023

@Lindsey Bryant Well, that's just plain old shared addresses - we have student and parent addresses shared/linked for just such convenience and we don't use households at all. Bryna's third link does a good job explaining the difference between things and why you might want to use households. We still don't, because the setup time would likely exceed the value.

Shannon Krise · July 2023

@Brent Wilhelm

We find the household list very useful for mailing lists, and use the household salutation as a merge field in a number of places. Emails generally go to both parents, but where we have something that needs to be mailed, it's helpful to have a household list so that we can send to Mrs. & Mr Parent, or a separate copy to both households in cases of divorce. Development requests this list fairly often for invitations etc.

The Household and Address list is available under Core>Users, but it is not available to very many roles by default.

Brent Wilhelm · July 2023

@Shannon Krise Thanks for the info. So it looks like the “Household & Addresses” menu has both shared and household addresses. So what is the value of defining the household?

Shannon Krise · July 2023

@Brent Wilhelm I think part of the confusion is that blackbaud refers to a “household” frequently when it really just means a shared address (Household blocks on forms, household salutations, members of a household only being able to update their own household's information on a profile update form etc.) We use the household list and the formal/informal salutations a lot, but those salutations are really tied to the shared address, and as you mentioned, they still appear on the household and addresses list even though there is no ID assigned to them.

It's possible that establishing the household ID, which happens when you officially designate a household, could be useful in advanced lists in some way, or if you had another technical reason to need a unique household identifier. As far as I can tell, the only other difference between an official household and a shared address is that you can then select a primary contact for the household. I'd be curious to know if any other users do this, and how they find it useful.

We have chosen not to identify a primary contact for the household, which means I don't have a good reason for creating households from shared addresses, but while the salutations (which I do need) take time to set up, turning the whole list of shared addresses into households only takes any time at all because you can't “select all” on that list. Most of them show up already designated as households (I'm assuming based on the way they were entered from application forms) so when I'm going through the household list at the start of the year to ensure that we have salutations entered and no stray duplicate addresses, I tend to just turn the shared addresses I have reviewed into households.

Beverly Byrd · August 2023

@Shannon Krise I know I am late to the party but came across this. We use the Household feature when the parents are divorced. We do not use Household otherwise.

Erin Caprielian · March 12

@Brent Wilhelm Thank you for asking this, Brent; I also hunted for more information in BB articles and on the BlackbaudU site, but like you said there's not much guidance. It would be helpful if they provided more information (example scenarios, etc.) for how and why Household is used. Appreciate the replies from others below!

Lauren Henderson · March 12

@Brent Wilhelm We were using the Household IDs for the sake of our tuition billing software in years past; this year we converted to Tuition Management and accounts are created and linked automatically, so I don't know that we will continue to create and utilize the Household ID in Education Management.

There is not a way to pull the household ID through advanced lists, and I don't expect there will be. The Household ID is available in SKY lists.

Brent Wilhelm · March 12

@Lauren Henderson, @Erin Caprielian

We haven’t reached any firm conclusions yet, but we’ve observed that addresses for families enrolled through BB’s EMS module are designated as Households. This makes us wonder if perhaps the EMS module brought the idea of Household addresses into Core.

Candi Roberts · March 13

@Brent Wilhelm I have only recently started using these. It is needed if you ever want to print mailing labels. But I use it the most for identifying family units for reports. If you add the column Household in Students Lists, it provides the household that includes a number which makes it very easy to identify the number of households.

Households

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