We have a Constituent who's spouse is a major solicitor for our organization and we want to be able to report on the success of this solicitor as we do with constituent solicitors. In order to do this reporting, we split the spouse out of the constituent's record and gave him his own record. Now the solicitor reporting works, but we are having trouble with their mailings. We think having the option of making a spouse in a record a solicitor would solve that problem, but that is not available from RE. How do others handle this situation?

What problems are you having with mailings?

We have this situation and we use the Head of Household feature on every mailing so that mailings go to the correct record. Melissa S. Graves
Manager, Development Database & Direct Mail
Planned Parenthood of Connecticut
[Email Removed]
203-752-2804

P.S. I will be attending the conference in October. A group of Forum users will be meeting on Sunday. Contact me directly if meeting interests you.

This can be a difficult issue, depending on how you use RE. In the past, I was with an org that ALWAYS created a separate constituent record if both spouses were MEMBERS. Currently, the org I work for NEVER splits the spouse records. One constituent is considered the primary spouse and the other is only a relationship to the primary. By using the RE: Mail function and choosing the option on Gen 1 tab to only send to Head of Household, you can eliminate duplicate mailings to spouses who are both constituents. Tracie Cassidy Database Coordinator Seattle Children's Hospital Foundation (206) 987-6833 [Email Removed]

Sorry for the late response.I use the head of household checkbox too and that works for mailings but I was having trouble w/ split spouses both showing up in tallies and skewing our annual giving percentages (I work at a school so this might not be applicable to everyone) We have current paretns whose records we've had to split b/c one is a solicitor for us. I created an attribute called "Omit from family tally" and put it on the solicitor spouse's record. That way I can exclude them from reports and stop the double counting.