We have always created separate records for organizations with the same name but different addresses. It was that way when I took over the database and everyone was comfortable with it so we kept doing it that way and I didn't think about it much. Now we have a new director who wants it as one organization name = one record so that all the gifts are in the same place. A lot of our same-name organization records have several individual relationships. If we combine them we'll have 30-40 of these on the same record. I'm uneasy about going ahead with this because it's easier to merge records than to try to divide them again. The director says "Everybody does it this way." when she wants something changed, and I know from the postings in this forum that everybody doesn't do things the same way. Which way do you do it - different records or all-in-one? Anything I should watch for if we merge everything?

We currently have 10,000+ organisations on RE so this is a big issue for us. In general terms, we try to have only one record for each organisation, i.e. we have only one Boeing record, rather than one for each of its locations. This means that for the larger organisations we can often have 50+ relationships for each, often with their own unique address details. This is very useful if you want to produce a report for an organisation – rather than having to make sure your query includes all the different instances of an organisation, you can just say show me everything for X. This is particularly useful if you add actions against organisations. However, the drawback of this is that merging is a nightmare. I personally do not trust the automated merge feature as it tends to assign the preferred organisation address to any relationship merged into an organisation, i.e. you lose the original relationship address. At the moment we manually merge relationships to ensure the address details are copied over correctly. If you are going to start de-duplicating your database from scratch this could be a big job. We are currently on 7.61 so I'm not sure if this has been improved in later versions. Hope this helps. David Jones Information Officer (Business Liaison) University of Sheffield

I wouldn't put them all into one record if I could avoid it. If you have separate giving histories and separate relationships that is what separate records are for. RE has the parent corp field and we use that to link relationships together. Every organization usually has a headquarters and we would establish that as the parent corp record. For all subsidiaries/sattelite offices - we would create separate records but put the headquarters into the parent corp field (on Bio 2). You then have the separate records and separate relationships and a way to report on them together. You can use query to say give me all records with X as a parent corp and put that query into a financial report to see what the entire company gives. One thing we do is purposely not use the exact same org name for all of them if we can avoid it. If you can make the org name for the parent corp something even slightly different than the subisieries then it becomes easier to pick it out on a search screen. Include the word headquarters on the parent corp or include the word subsidiery, franchise or the city on the other records may help. We have this issue with churches - there are a million First Congregational Churches for example so we include the town name in the org name just so we can identify them in the search screen. You can also customize the search screen to include fields like address to make the searching easier but this is user defined and all users would have to comply. *** I can spell, I just can't type. Where is spell check? Melissa S. Graves Manager, Development Database & Direct Mail Planned Parenthood of Connecticut [Email Removed] 203-752-2804

I would be cautious about merging ALL subsidiaries into one record. If your talking universities or foundations of orgainzations many times they ARE a separate entity. Additionally, how are you going to keep track of the different relationships that are already on each organizational record? if they are all merged to ONE record how are you going to know that John Smith is the primary contact in Houston and Jon Smith is the primary contact for the Dallas office? I realize that you'll probably know the difference by the address, but how will you query on them? How will you manage your mailings? Also, donor giving can be an issue some employee programs are site specific so they would need to be recgonized as that instead of XYC corporation. If your director is wanting this just to see total giving or total activity, I'd suggest 1. using the subsidiary/parent company field found on bio 2 2. Create a org to org relationship between the two and then marking "soft credit this relationship for every gift" on the relationship of the MAIN company. 3. Set up a business rule that indicated the record is part of an Corp/subsidiary relationship I think that if you've been using this system and it works why change it... the bottom line question is "what result does yor director want" and then find a way to get that for them WITHOUT interferring with your data integrity. Elaine Tucker Stewardship Coordinator St. Mark's School of Texas www.smtexas.org  [Email Removed] another great forum: http://reusers.server-planet.com  --- Edited at 10/20/2006 9:39:49 AM by Elaine Tucker