We are new to Net community.  We currently have Raiser's Edge (RE) set up with Parent's as a constituent and their spouse as only a spousal non-constituent record.  How will this affect us moving forward.  Will we need to create constituent records for all the spouses?  How will we accept donations made by the spouse?

(We were required to make all of our teacher's their own record in RE for them to have a web page.  It did not pull from their F/S record in Education Edge.)

Any help will be appreciated.  :)

And Welcome!   If you are looking to track your Parents only, and there are no immediate plans to track the Spouses of those parents, then, just enter the spouses in the same record of the parent. If you decide later that you want to create the spouse as having a separate record, you have the option in RE create the record for you through the relationship tab, and selecting "add this individual as a constituent".

Hope this helps a little.

Elizabeth,

We will be implementing NetCommunity this winter & are also concerned with these "spouse issues?" We, too, keep a majority of our married donors together, since that is the way they give; as couples, not as individuals. Do you use NetCommunity for events & membership? How does keeping the spouses on one record impact when 2 people or the spouse of a donor register for an event? I'm thinking in those cases, you'd almost have to create a separate, linked spouse relationship in order for your event info to be accurate? Would love to hear your experiences with this so far.

Our rule is that if we are downloading a donation and one spouse is already a constituent, we put the donation on that person's record. If a person registers on our website or registers for an event, we add the spouse record and elevate it to a constituent record. Basically, once we know we have a direct relationship with a person, that person gets has a constituent record.

Unfortunately, we don't use NetCommunity.  So maybe your process would be a little different from mine own.  When we enter the couple into the Events module, what we do is create a link.  However, the events module only seems to pick up the primary person of that record.  In order to record the secondary spouse's attendence, we enter the seconardy spouse in the events module, manually, "as a guest". Then we create the relationship with the primary spouse, by linking the secondary spouse through the field called " Guest of ".  

We find this helps us a great deal, especially when it comes to using the seating chart.  But that is another story.

Ah well, not helpful to you as I would have hoped.  But where there is a will there is a way.