How do other organizations handle Households?

Craig Anderson
Craig Anderson
Second Anniversary Participant
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions

We would like to be able to report on total contributions made by a household, not just an individual. This could even include non-related people or family members. How do other organizations handle this?

Tagged:

Comments

  • Joe Moretti
    Joe Moretti Community All-Star
    Kudos 5 Third Anniversary Raiser's Edge NXT Fall 2025 Product Update Briefing Badge First Reply

    @Craig Anderson Our organization or any other I worked for never asked for something like this, which could be problematic. You could make sure everyone in the household is soft credited, but I do not think you want to go down that road. Curious to hear from others.

  • Dana Burton
    Dana Burton
    Kudos 5 Third Anniversary Name Dropper Participant

    @Craig Anderson, for us, gifts primarily show up under the husband's name. The wife is listed as a spouse and will be soft credited all gifts if he passes. There are rare instances for us that the husband and wife require their own accounts and for the gifts not to be shared to the other person's account.

    We also have families that have elderly parents living with them and both sets of families are donors - and require their own records for accuracy and for when we are audited.

    That being said, we report on the individual/couple/business, in addition to fund, appeal, campaign, etc.

  • Carol Grant
    Carol Grant
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply Name Dropper

    @Craig Anderson this is tricky to say the least. We have spouse records and we soft credit both.

    I've done it a number of ways depending on the reporting needs.

    1. One way is I run a constituent export and pull only head of household (soft credit to both)
    2. I have run a gift export, exported head of household indicator and done a formula in Excel or Power BI. (soft credit to both)
    3. Our couples have the same Couple Addressee Name (use Name field for singles) so I will use that to remove any duplicates or to group by using a gift export.

    These aren't perfect solutions but they work.

    Carolyn Grant

    Middlebury College


  • Jennifer Sparrow
    Jennifer Sparrow
    Name Dropper First Anniversary Facilitator 1

    @Craig Anderson
    We haven't done it well - I'm struggling too. I don't understand why there isn't a household ID/group ID option in RE like there are in other CRMs. The other databases I worked in would default this ID to the head of household ID when created, but we could manually update it on records for things like DAFs, other family members, etc. to create an easy way to do group reporting, invites, etc. Right now we're utilizing a matrix of relationships to capture this and it's not efficient - it's easy to mess up, too.

  • Melissa Anderson
    Melissa Anderson
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Craig Anderson

    We use the spouse check box to link spouses together and then it automatically soft credits the non-paying spouse. For families, we create an organization record, even if it is not a family trust, and then create contact records for the contributors. We only have two families that give individually but pay off a “family” pledge. The pledge is on the family record, and we enter the payment on the individuals record and link it to the pledge.

  • Lauren Henderson
    Lauren Henderson Community All-Star
    Kudos 5 Fourth Anniversary February 2026 Monthly Challenge bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    @Craig Anderson
    I'm curious about what is going to be done with this information, or what your org hopes to gain by reporting on this information. Are you trying to pare down a physical mailing list (newsletter, magazine, etc?) Or target mailings especially to this population of multiple donors living at the same address?

Categories