Can anybody explain to me a neat method of handling 'head of household'  records, whereby (in our example) we have two Alumni who live at the same address, and so only one piece of literature needs to be mailed to the household, rather than one per constituent?

 
Thanks,
Pete 

Hi Peter,

I recommend using a mail task.  Depending on the literature (pre-printed flyer, brochure, postcard or a form letter) you are sending, you can use the Label or quick letter mail task.   On the general tab of a mail task, you'll see the Head of Household processing options.  From here, select send to head of household.   This option will only use the spouse's constituent record (addressee, salutation and address block) marked head of household.

If you're looking to use an export because there is more information than what's available in a mail task, you can run a mail task and use the output query in your export.

Let me know if you have any questions.  Good Luck,

jwant

Hey,

 Thanks for getting back to me. I think the limitation of HOH records (constituent spouse only, not applicable to any household type) is what has thrown me. I was unable to find a decent reference to it in the software, and only through digging deeper have I found why the options is so often unavailable.

 Are you aware of a method which would allow me to include non-spouse constituents, or even other household types, and run them as a head of household?

Thanks,
Pete
 

Pete,

I'm fairly sure that the head of household selection does not exclude non-spouse constituents, but only offers the user an option manage those constituent records that are linked through spouse records.

jwant

Currently the system will only allow you to choose a spouse relationship as a HOH.  I do believe, however that the next platform has been re-designed to allow family groups where any member of the group can be the head.  I would check out the design playground and see what it looks like if you are interested.  it will take patience to get there but it is in the works.

Ok, so the next question is really this:

Is there a half-decent interim measure I can put in place? Something which will allow me to emulate the behaviour of HOH constituents, but not limited to spousal relationships, and which can also, at a later date, be easily exported and applied to the existing HOH system when it is 'upgraded'.

 Thanks for your time :)
 

Pete,

I don't really follow, but let me give it a try.  Back to the original example, two alumni at the same address.  I'm assuming these two alumni have their own constituent records, but live at the same address. Are they linked through a non-spousal individual relationship records?  I think organizing a system to handle this scenario would be more trouble than it's worth, unless the constituents have requested it or you have many records that meet the same criteria.  Which one is it?

If neither, then I would not bother and just keep sending two pieces since the money saved by eliminating the one mail piece (or a few dozen depending on how many records fit the bill) is far less than the resources spent on coming up with a system.

If it's one of the two reasons above, then we're talking about an elaborate system using constituent attributes representing each mail piece (include/exclude), and possibly creating specific addresssees/salutations so you can address the mail piece to both alumni and process everything neatly using a mail task.

Let me know.

jwant

I think what he wants to do is set up someone other than the spouse as the HOH such as a mother, father, brother, etc. 

"I think organizing a system to handle this scenario would be more trouble than it's worth"

Sadly, we don't always get easy to handle requests :)

"unless the constituents have requested it or you have many records that meet the same criteria.  Which one is it?" 

A bit of both. Currently, I'm only aware of pairs of people who have requested a single mailing, but the theory could involve 100 people living at one address (yes, I know), and only wanting one copy of a given piece of marketing literature.

The real crux is not setting the Head of Household (HOH) in itself, this can be handled easily (setting an attribute and only selecting where HOH != no), but in fact correctly identifying whether a record has a set of non-HOH relationships or not, and applying a correct salutation accordingly, i.e. 'Mr Jones', or 'Mr Jones and Family' (or 'Mr and Mrs Jones' etc etc)

Some of our mailings wouldn't matter, such as our annual alumni magazine, but other mailings would matter a great deal, such as fundraising letters and so forth.

 P
 

All I do in this scenario is use attributes or solicit codes to exclude the other members of the household from getting mail you do not want them to get.  We occasionally make a record for a child if they get tribute gifts or volunteer, etc. so we simply mark their record NO MAIL.  We create an action for when he/she is older to see if we want to remove the no mail code.

I've been thinking hard on this one, and I've been in touch with BB support,and I have one final niggle, but one which I'm not convinced has a sufficiently convenient answer.

 I can very easily flag the requested HOH records, and very easily select/exclude records based on that, and furthermore very easily set up a salutation suitable for the mailing, but one problem still remains:
 
 When I select the records, some of which will be standard (non-HOH records), and some will be HOH marked records. How can I then determine within a query which salutation to use. Is there an option to do this...

If ( record is HOH ) then ( select Salutation A ) else ( select Salutation B )

If i can't do that within a query then I'll have to export all the data to excel/access/another DB, and manually apply the correct salutation to the record before processing the data. This would potentially cause headaches if I wanted to re-import the data to use any of the RE features like Mail.

 An answer to this would make me a very happy bunny indeed.

 
Many Thanks,
Pete
 

 I realise that this answer is not for all organisations but in case you do own the VBA module what I have done previously is to, on save of a record, update the addressee and salutation depending of criteria. In your case you would check to see if it was head of household or not but equally you may want to check to see if they have a partner at all or in cases where they do not have a first name or only have an initial you may want to automatically change the salutation to Dear Friend.

 David

I see what you're saying there, but I don't like the approach in itself (plus I don't think we have VBA plugin).

I'd like to maintain the integrity of the data in terms of the descriptor for the data and the data itself being consistent with one another, so having a family salutation described as  an individual one wouldn't be my favoured method.

I'd really like the functionality in my request to be put into future builds of RE, it seems silly to me they've built in HOH processing, but then spent time limiting it to only spousal constituents.

Until then I just want to find an effective method to handle it so I can fulfill the requests we're getting from our Alumni, a method which is both convenient and doesn't lead to problems in other areas, and which can also be easily converted out once RE get their act together and make it possible natively.

If you have any solutions which fit the bill, please let me know :)

Thanks
 

Back in July 2000 when we began using Raiser's Edge, someone (not me) came up with the scheme our organization uses to solve this problem. We deal with families where the children are entered as constituents with their own events information, etc. To make one-per-household mailings possible, our database was set up to show the relationship-type "Same Address", reciprocal of "Household" from the head-of-household . All of the one-per-household mailings included the query criterion, "individual relationship does not equal 'Household' ". (with this database usage, the feature allowing you to control head of household processing from the Raiser's Edge Export or Mail functions does not work - you must build it into the query you use.)

Our household mailings use a "household addressee", to which I imagine you could import brother-and-brother names, for example, as text (rather than using blackbaud's addressee numbering scheme which, again, doesn't seem to work for households that are tracked as something other than a married couple with no children.

 The "same address / household" thing for relationships is redundant and therefore a source of possible data disagreements. Since starting here, I've changed the info a little bit but the basic scheme is still there. (The info is still redundant, but different redundant info that helps a crystal report work right)

My boss suggested that we do mail each a piece, be that the Annual Report or a quarterly cultivation, as long as both are alumni. If only one is an alumni, then we try to make that one the Head of Household for a more frugal mailing.