A Few Random Questions

Hello and welcome to the arrival of spring and much finer weather!

This edition of my blog is a little more “ad hoc” than previous postings, as I will answer a few random questions sent to me from a couple of Blog readers. If ever you have a Raiser’s Edge or technology related question that you would like to see addressed in a future blog, please feel free to contact me directly at plucas@resolutionstech.com

Thanks to Gary in England and Sherry in Winnipeg for submitting the questions:
1) What is the purpose and appropriate use of the Relationship/Reciprocal drop down menus when establishing a relationship between Constituents?
2) How does sharing and copying a preferred address from one Constituent to another work?
3) What is the best way to handle and eliminate duplicate records from displaying in the output of a query?


1) Whenever you are establishing a relationship between Constituents in your Raiser’s Edge – whether that be a Relationship between two Individuals or a Relationship between an Individual and an Organization – it is important to accurately identify and track the type of Relationship that exists between the two Constituents. The Relationship and Reciprocal fields are used to describe this relationship.
In some instances, the Relationship and the Reciprocal fields may be identical. Many organizations choose to identify married couples as “Spouse” rather than “Husband” and “Wife” in the Relationship and Reciprocal fields. In this scenario, both the Relationship field and the Reciprocal field will have “Spouse” selected from the drop down menu on both records.
More commonly, however, these two entries will not be identical and will in fact be opposite to each other. For example, if you are establishing an employee—employer relationship between an Individual Constituent (the employee) and an Organizational Constituent (the employer) on each of those two records the Relationship and Reciprocal fields will be opposite. Thus, on the employer record, the Relationship field is marked as “Employee” and the Reciprocal is marked as “Employer” and on the employee record, the Relationship field is marked as “Employer” and the Reciprocal is marked as “Employee”.
Similarly, when establishing a relationship between, for example, a parent and child in your Raiser’s Edge, on the parent’s relationship record the Relationship field will be marked as “Child” and the Reciprocal field will be marked as “Parent”; on the child’s relationship record, those two field entries will be reversed.
Whenever you are establishing relationships between your Raiser’s Edge Constituents, it is important to track the type of Relationship using the Relationship and Reciprocal fields to easily identify how Constituents in your data base are related to one another. Keep in mind that you can create virtually any type of relationship between Constituents in your database, and while the most common relationship that you draw is likely to be a spousal relationship, any kind of relationship – from Friend to Golf Partner to Business Associate – can be established. Simply remember that in the Relationship drop down menu, select the individual’s relationship to the Constituent, such as “Mother” and in the Reciprocal field, select the Constituent’s relationship to the individual, such as “Son”.

2) Frequently when you have established Relationships between your Constituents, you will note that two Constituents may share the same preferred address, for example in the case of a married couple or a parent and a child that live at the same location. These addresses and corresponding phone types can be marked as “shared”, thus indicating that the same address is tracked on more than one record in your database. By clicking “Constituent” from the menu bar of an open Constituent record, you will note the option to Copy and Share the current Constituent’s address to another Constituent. Thus, address updates and changes made on one record can automatically be applied to the linked record.

3) For anyone who runs queries in Raiser’s Edge, without question one of the most frustrating aspects of the whole query process is having duplicate records displayed on the query output screen. Why does Raiser’s Edge produce multiple listings of the same Constituent when that Constituent is only in the database once? There are essentially two reasons why the same Constituent may appear multiple times in your query results:
A) The Constituent qualifies for the criteria you indicated multiple times. For example, if part of the query criteria is something like “Gift amount greater than $100.00”, and the Constituent has 5 gifts each greater than $100.00, then that Constituent will appear on your query results 5 times if you have chosen a query output of, say First and Last Name.
B) Another scenario that may cause the same Constituent to appear multiple times in the output is the fields chosen in the output screen. For example, if you choose to have phone number in the output, each phone number that a person has will appear on a separate row in your output, thus the same Constituent may appear multiple times.

There are two things you can do in Raiser’s Edge to limit the occurrence of duplicates:
i) Use the “Suppress Duplicate Rows” feature found as a checkbox within the query under the menu item “Tools”, then “Query Options” then “Record Processing”. This will help alleviate the issue, though it often will not completely solve the problem.
ii) The single best method of eliminating duplicates from appearing in your query output is to not have any output whatsoever. If the output tab is left completely blank, clicking on the Results tab will provide you with the number of Constituents that qualify for the criteria you have chosen. This number will NOT contain any duplicates. To verify this, compare this number without any output to the number of returns when output such as First Name and Last Name is indicated and you may notice a difference in the number of returns generated. The difference between these two numbers is the duplicates being displayed when output is chosen. Thus, having no output whatsoever will eliminate these instances of duplication. The query can then be saved with no output and the user can utilize the Raiser’s Edge Export feature found along the main blue menu bar to export the results of the query to, for example, an Excel spreadsheet without having the duplicated records displayed.

Thanks again for reading my Blog and please contact us at sales@resolutionstech.com if we can assist you in managing your Raiser’s Edge database more effectively.

We offer personalized on-line training sessions through which we can explore in much more detail those three questions in today’s blog or any other specific question or challenge that faces you and your staff while working in Raiser’s Edge. It is a powerful, comprehensive database system, but can only be truly effective if the users and data entry people are properly trained and acclimated to the nuances within the system. It is these details within Raiser's Edge that have a tremendous impact on your organization’s ability to track and maintain essential data on your donors, alumni, board members, event attendees, suppliers and any other businesses or individuals that you have a point of contact with.