I would like to find out how other organizations manage corporations with multiples addresses and what are the benefits?  We have corporations that we do business with/or provide us with services, and have coded them as vendors, and once a year we get information from within our system to update them, but in some cases these vendors have up to 5 of the same names with different addresses. These addresses sometimes belong to a lockbox, or to a subdivision.  For example AT&T, we get AT&T Global services, AT&T Foundation, AT&T at 3 different locations.

I spoken with someone at BB, and they say that the choice is enterily up to the organization. Can someone give me a suggestion if we should or shouldn't enter them all or only one and what are the befenits?

Thank you.

Nohemy G. Monge
Data Systems Specialist
Saint Clare's Foundation-NJ

You actually have a couple of options:

 1) If you want just one organizational constituent record - say for 'A T & T' - just list all of the subsidary addresses under the address tab of the 'A T & T' record in the Raisers Edge.

or,

2) If you have need to distinguish the subsidary addresses, then establish individual organizational constituent records for each one. I personally find this option the most useful. As an example, in the case of 'A T & T' - the corporate address would most likely be the vendor address, but 'A T & T Foundation' may be where corporate matching gifts are actually sent from. You would want completely separate records in this type of scenerio.

A corporation and it's foundation are legally two separate entities and I would absolutely create separate records for them (with a relationship). 

If the corporation has sattelite offices or subsidiaries, whether or not you create separate records for them entirely depends on your relationship with them.  Do you have contacts at these other offices?  Do you solicit them separately?  Do they give separately?  If any of these are true we would create separate records for them and a) link them through the parent corporation field on Org2 b) link them through relationships and c) set up an auto soft credit up to the parent organization.

If you have no contact with these other offices then I would simply list them as alternate addresses on the corporate records.

We create a separate record for each subsidiary.  In addition, we sometimes have multiple records for different floors or offices within the same building if they perform food drives for us.

What we find useful is to create an alias for the headquarters record and build reciprocal relationships with all the subsidiaries and it.  We label the alias name primary (e.g. Microsoft Primary) so we can search for it.

Eric Aldrich

Database Administrator, Northwest Harvest, Seattle