Best Practices for PE/RE integration, part I

I've gotten some requests to write more about integration between Patron Edge and The Raiser's Edge, so today I'm starting a three-part series on ways to get the most out of your integration while minimizing the amount of cleanup and management needed. Let's start with some ideas for handling constituent/CRM records.

Code tables: Ensure your code tables in The Raiser's Edge are spotless before integrating with Patron Edge. The ones to pay most attention to are Address Types, States, Solicit Codes, Titles and Suffixes. PE is great at ticketing, but doesn't have some of the advanced CRM features of RE (like global change), so you'll want to take care of this ahead of time.

Addresses: The Raiser's Edge allows a constituent to have multiple addresses of the same type, while Patron Edge enforces a rule that only one address is allowed per Address Type. For example, make sure your constituents in RE don't have more than one Home address; only the first one on the record will sync with Patron Edge.

Phones: The same thing goes here as with Address Types, but with more flexibility. The Raiser's Edge makes phone types a child of addresses, while Patron Edge makes it a child of the main CRM record. The Integration Control program lets you choose which RE address type to sync phone numbers with, but think about the implications of this. If you have a Home address in RE and you choose to sync Mobile phone with Home, keep in mind that if Mobile is also a phone type on the Work address in RE with a different phone number, it does not sync. In this case, consider being specific with your phone types, like Personal Mobile and Work Mobile, so that you can sync both and have them live on the desired address.

Deceased flag: Patron Edge doesn't have the concept of 'deceased', so if this information is important to your box office/guest services folks, consider globally adding it in The Raiser's Edge as a constituent code. Globally adding and deleting things in RE is so easy and you can base it on a query. Using it as a constituent code/client type allows you to mark people deceased in both directions as well, because you can use the Query module in RE to round up folks with that constituent code and then globally mark them deceased. Now you can take full advantage in RE of the Deceased features in Mail, Reports and Export.

What is your process for dealing with addresses or deceased clients? Share your tips in the comments.