We currently have too many constituency codes to manage....we are looking to moving some of them to relationships. For example we have several volunteer committees that are currently constituency codes that we would like to move. We thought about making them attributes but we want the date range in tact for tracking purposes. Has anyone had any success with this type of thing? Thanks!

I have found that committess and boards that need date ranges as opposed to just a single date (that you could do in attributes) work best for me under Education. That way I can track the date entered into the system, the status (active, inactive, Hiatus,etc.)

I make the School Name the board or committee, The school Type becomes, director, officer, ex-officio, prospect,etc.

The date entered is just that - the date they begin the term or date entered if a prospect for a committee or board. Date Graduated is the date the term ends. Date Left is the date all terms are completed if they do more than one term. Status allows me to inactivate prospects but not lose track of the fact that they were once prospects to be on a board or committee.

I think that a regular organization relationship would be just as good as an education relationship.  There are two dates in any relationship and you can use the position field to put in the commiittee/role.

Melissa is absolutley right about that - The only reason I don't do it that way is because then we end up having hundreds of relationships on an org record and our other staff get very confused with having to look through relationships in order to find the main contact.

For me, it's really just a clutter function. (Previous data entry folks linked hundreds of employees to the organizations and didn't necessarily define them as employees or what their relationship was. It took me forever to clean up to where I had primary and specific event contacts on organizations that could be used properly in the Mail functions)

 I use the Education area Only for Major Boards at each Hospital and use attributes for most of our committees - but I don't need to track historically membership to committees - For us, it's only important if they were solicitors and if they were - it is tracked on gifts they solicited.

Thank you for the great feedback!