Constituent Databases 101: Family Records and Householding

There are different ways to store families in databases.

What’s the best way to store family and household information on your constituents in your nonprofit database? Constituent data, especially personal data pertaining to prospects, donors, patrons and friends is often stored differently in an advancement database than it might be in a typical for-profit business customer database.

Most small companies keep records for customers as completely single entities.  There is usually very little effort to recognize family members or spouses living at the same home address because it isn’t all that necessary.  This makes sense in most cases because customers often make purchases as individuals, not as couples or families.

But for non-profits, this can lead to wasted mailings and annoyed donors.

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