About Relationships and Households

Create relationships and households to link constituents in Bloomerang CRM:

You can create both relationships and households. For example, Ash Smith belongs to the Smith household and also has multiple relationships (family, friends, and coworkers).

Relationships are a record of how your constituents are connected to each other.

Use relationships to connect members of an organization, employers with employees, constituents with their foundation, and more. Constituents can have multiple relationships. You can also add, edit, and delete relationship roles.

To view relationships, you can:

Read about how to create and manage relationships.

Households pull together and display data from all of the household members.

Create households to link constituents you are cultivating together, such as spouses and family members. This helps you to:

A constituent may only belong to one household to avoid mailing conflicts and double-counting donations.

Read about how to create and manage households.

When you create households, keep in mind these best practices:

Create a household to understand how a family contributes to your organization as a single giving unit.

Households also allow you to save on postage and printing costs by sending one piece of mail, not two or more, to households where you have multiple constituents.

Maintaining separate records for each member of the household lets you communicate with them individually, especially by email. For example, if one household member is a board member and the other is a volunteer, creating a household merges their giving history into a single report and allows you to send single acknowledgment and solicitation letters. Households do not count against your licensed limit of constituents. Creating a household causes Bloomerang CRM to count two constituents not as two records, and not as three records, but as one record for purposes of tracking the size of your database.

When constituents are in a household, the household and all members count as one constituent toward your license count.

For example, Jo Smith and Chris Smith have two individual profiles and one household profile. All three profiles count as one toward your license count.

You can group as many constituents in a household as there are individuals in that household that you want to communicate with separately -- so, dependent children in the case of schools or churches; or extended family members who consider themselves a single family unit. It is usually not a good idea to maintain adult children as members of a household once they have their own address -- that is what the “Relationships” function is for.

No, constituents are not automatically added to households.

No, you can't import households.

Name your households consistently. You can always use the formal name, envelope name, and recognition name fields to make sure you address the members in the way they want to be addressed.

We recommend following the naming format for individuals and organizations.

Another example:

Each household has one member labeled as the Head of Household. Bloomerang CRM uses that household member's contact information when communicating with the household. Select a Head of Household who has the strongest relationship with your organization.

Another constituent's information is used if both of the following are true:

You can change the Head of Household.

You can’t add a donation to a household account. Instead, add the donation to a household member's account. The donation appears on the household's timeline.

For reporting and retention tracking, we recommend that you track all household donations on the Head of Household account. However, try to understand your donors' preferences. If one spouse prefers to give to a program and the other to operating, we recommend that you record their gifts separately.

We recommend that you enter this donation in the Head of Household's individual account unless household members have other preferences.

To find the Head of Household and enter the donation:

To send the letter to the household address instead of each individual in the household, on the Details tab of the letter template, set the Create One Letter Per option to Household. The entire household receives one piece of mail instead of each individual.

In constituent-type emails, on the Recipients tab, change the email filter to Households. Bloomerang CRM sends the email to only the primary email address of the household. For more information, read How Do I Email Only the Head of Household?

When you build a constituent-type email and change the filter type to Household, Bloomerang CRM uses only the Head of Household’s email interests. Read more about this.

If you select the Constituents filter type, Bloomerang CRM honors the email interests for each individual household member. For example, if the Head of Household is opted out of all marketing emails, but a household member is opted in, that household member receives the marketing email.

If you filter by household communication restrictions, households are included or excluded when all members of the household meet the criteria. See an example of this.

Household membership doesn’t affect entry into automations. For example, if a household member makes a donation and enters a donation automation, no other household members enter the automation for that donation.

Who retains the donation history is a matter of your organization’s preference and, if appropriate, finding out the donors’ wishes. If one member of the household is closer to the organization than the other, it might be worth asking them. Typically, the giving history will remain with the constituent with the closer relationship (board member, volunteer).

Selecting Export Households in the Details tab of a transaction, interaction, note, or task report means that if any individual meets your filter criteria that is linked in a household, the name and profile info will display from the household record and not the individual. Also, if more than one individual in the same household meets your filter criteria, only the household record will display, not each individual.

It may be helpful to think of it like this: if John and Jane are in a household together, and you run a report that includes filtering that includes Jane but excludes John (or includes both), exporting to household will cause John and Jane’s household to appear on the report (since Jane meets the filter criteria or both). This behavior is the same for letters as well when using the One Letter Per Household option.

Changing the filters in a constituent report from constituent to household means that the filters will look at the combined household to determine includes/excludes, and will display the household record if it meets your filters, not each individual record.

A household profile contains a mix of household-specific information and combined data from the members of the household. Here's what the header and each profile page includes: