Interacting with your community on an individual level can already be complex, so when adding the intricacies of close relationships and families it can mean that you need to store some additional data to more easily group and contact them.
Whilst we usually recommend that each person is simply treated as an individual entity, there are some common scenarios that might come up where you may want to consider their partner or family.
General approach
As mentioned above, wherever possible you should consider each person in their own right.
Joint records
e.g. "Mr & Mrs Smith" as a single Person record
We strongly recommend never storing joint records in Beacon. It goes against our ethos of storing data as close to reality as possible (there's two people, not one), and it leads to lots of data complications. We’ve found almost no customers who have been happy with joint records where they’ve used them in previous systems, and we think there are better ways to link special humans together.
Households
e.g. A grouping of 5 family members into a "Smith Household"
We recommend to avoid tracking households unless it’s absolutely essential. It adds significant complexity, increases time and effort to maintain, and is rarely required to achieve what you want to do with them. You'll probably find a simpler solution below!
Scenarios
There are a few different solutions that come together to help you manage couples and households. Here we show the high-level description of the scenarios to be solved and our recommended solution, and link you to how it works and how to set it up.
Scenarios for couples
Here are the scenarios that mean you might be tempted to use a joint record, and what we'd recommend for managing couples instead!
Single contact for direct mail / send a single letter for two people
Solution:
Mark one person as a Primary contact
Use a Custom salutation & envelope name field for their joint name
Group a couple together so that they both get credit for either of their contributions, even if they weren’t the direct payer
Solution:
Gift Aid is from one person, relationship is with the other
Solution:
Scenarios for households
Household records can work where they're essential to your organisation's operations, but they are a significant increase in complexity that should be avoided in most situations. Here are the scenarios that mean you might be interested in tracking a household.
View someone's family
Solution:
Use Beacon's inbuilt Relationships tab to document family members and view an individual's relationships.
Single contact for direct mail / send a single letter for multiple people
Solution:
Mark one person as a Primary contact
Use a Custom salutation & envelope name field for their joint name
Require household-level reporting or segmentation
For example:
You want to make asks for new donations from those who are in a household who has given > £10,000 even if those people haven't personally given.
You want to be able to store and use household demographic information, such as estimated wealth/estate value, household income, etc. that is different to their individual information.
Solution:
The one time we recommend a Household record type!
Solutions
These solutions are used in varying ways to solve the scenarios above.
Primary contact checkbox
What does this solution enable?
Creates the ability to mail/contact a single person at a household instead of all members of a household by marking only one of them as the record to contact.
Setup
Create a new checkbox on People named
Primary contact?, setting ‘checked’ as the default value
Process
Uncheck the
Primary contact?checkbox on anyone who isn’t the main person to contact from that couple/group of family members/addressInclude
Primary contact? is checkedin filters for direct mailing campaigns so that you're only sending it to one person.
Tip: Try filtering people for 'Address > Line One is not unique', and sorting by that same column, to find people who may be partners or in the same household that you might want to uncheck the Primary contact field for.
Custom salutation & envelope name
What does this solution enable?
Address mail to a couple/household name instead of an individual’s name.
Setup
Create fields for both salutations and envelope names. See our guide here for more information and step by step instructions.
Create a
Custom salutationshort text fieldCreate a
Salutationsmart short text fieldCreate a
Custom envelope nameshort text fieldCreate a
Envelope namesmart short text field
Additional advanced option: Create a Partner point to another record field on People, and reference their partner's name directly in your smart fields.
Process
On the primary contact, set a couple or household name in the
Custom salutationandCustom envelope namefields. e.g. “John & Mary Smith” or “The Smith Household”Use your new fields in your contact, such as such as in a Document merge or Email templates
Use the
Salutationfield when inserting a person's name into your letter or emailUse the
Envelope namefield to formally address your post.
Soft credit a partner on related payments
What does this solution enable?
Link payments to other people involved in the donation, even if they’re not the payer, to be able to see their non-direct ‘impact’. This is commonly used for the non-paying partner in a couple so that they’re still credited with value of the giving. This is often called 'soft crediting', and in Beacon the easiest way to do this is to include them in the Fundraising field of their partner's payments.
Setup
Create metric cards, rollup fields, and smart fields as necessary to show direct donations (Payments where they are the payer) as well as soft credited donations (Payments where they are the fundraiser). See our specific guide for creating soft credit reporting here.
Additional advanced option: Create a Partner point to another record field on People, and set up a workflow to automatically add their partner to the Fundraiser field of new payments where they’re the payer (but only if the Fundraiser field is blank)
Process
Add partners to be soft credited to the
Fundraiserfield of their partner's Payments, either manually or via a workflowInclude a filter for ‘Related payments, as fundraiser…’ (or the rollup/smart fields if set up above) when filtering in lists, dashboard cards, exports, etc. to include their soft credits and therefore including their total 'couple' impact.
Link Gift Aid declarations and donations to the donor
What does this solution enable?
Gift Aid declarations should be linked to the specific individual that gave the declaration, and donations should be linked to the specific individual that made the donation, rather than to a joint record or the person you have a relationship with so that you remain compliant in your Gift Aid claims with HMRC.
Setup
When importing data:
Ensure Gift Aid declarations are linked to the correct individual, not a joint record
Ensure Payments are linked to the same individual
Link the Payments to their partner in the
Fundraiserfield so that you can soft credit them
Process
Use the Soft credit a partner on related payments method above to properly track couple contributions
Create a household record type
What does this solution enable?
Having a Household record allows you to group your People together both for segmentation, communication, and reporting.
Setup
Create a new record type called Households
Create a new point to another record field on People called
Household, linking to your new Households record typeCreate a related record card on Households that shows all the people linked to that Household
Create metric cards, rollup fields, and smart fields on the Household record that sum up contributions from the household members
Process
Set the
Householdmanually for any records that you want to group. We recommend not creating a Household record for all contacts; just those that you want to group together for your operations or reporting.Use the 'Household meets criteria…' option when filtering People to use their household data as a condition
Use the 'Related People...' option when filtering Households to use the individuals' data as a condition
There’s no automated way of adding people into a household. It’s so much more complicated than you think!