Family and Couple Accounts

When you create accounts for families and couples, you can manage them in different ways. For example, you can create separate accounts for each individual in a household and link them using a relationship. You can also create one account for the family or couple. The right approach depends on your organization's interaction with each individual.

Tip: To maximize the health of your data, we recommend you create an account for each individual in a household when possible. This helps decrease potential mistakes for processes such as sending communication with an incorrect short salutation or an incorrect name. This also helps improve data health services such as NCOA address processing.

Review the following scenarios to help determine when your organization should create a separate account for each individual in a household or should create one account for the family or couple.

• Both individuals are active with your organization, but in separate ways:

  OR

  Couple donates together, but only one individual is active with your organization:

  • Add an account for each individual in the household and link them together with Relationships. When you create a relationship, under Household Relationship, select Primary for one individual. For example, you have separate accounts for a husband, wife, and child. You select the husband as Primary when you add a relationship between the husband and wife, so make sure to select the husband as Primary when linking him to the child in a relationship. Enter a Joint persona for the primary individual, in addition to the personal or business persona. The Joint persona reflects the family or couple; not individual information.

    Tip: When you want to send communication to a family or household, you omit secondary individuals from a query using the data return type Head of Household Accounts to make sure the communication sends one time to the entire house.

• Couple donates together and both individuals are not active with your organization:

  • Add one account for the household using the Family Name Format. The personas reflect the family or couple; not individual information. The defined fields you select also apply to the family or couple.

    Tip: When you create an account with the Family Name Format, it is important to consider whether or not the individuals have the potential to become active with your organization. If it is possible, we recommend you create an account for each individual instead of one account. This helps to avoid complexities that occur when separating one account into multiple accounts.