Contact type advise

@Monica Curl Great question. I wish there were a better way but I don't know that there is.

We have been contemplating adding a second relationship to track who receives the scholarship thank you letter from student as sometimes it's primary and other times not. Makes pulling data into new scholarship manager software a real challenge.

Will be interested to see what others say, especially those that do use second relationships.

@Monica Curl I will start by saying that I've never worked with an organization that has this figured out. The coding is less of an issue than knowing who the correct person is though!

I think Attributes, as Brian suggested, is the best option. I don't think you need to add a “see attributes" contact type though. Your organization's policy simply becomes “we don't use contact type - we define those details on the Contact Attributes tab”. But one contact can have multiple attributes and it works just fine.

When using any of the functions in the Mail section of RE, you can specify the contact attributes on the Org Address tab. Skip the top checkbox to include selected contact types only, but click the button to specify which contact attributes to include:

In Export, you will have a similar screen available to filter contacts, but only if you select “Address Processing” from the Address node:

Either of the above should ultimately provide one row per contact in your final mailing list. If you uncheck that box (named “print one for each contact found” in Mail, vs. “Export one record for each contact found” in Export) you will get only one row for the organization. I forget the hierarchy it will use to select the contact if multiple meet your filtered criteria, but I believe that can be found in the knowledgebase if needed.

Karen