[smoore]

As I am fairly new to the arts world I need to ask how others have handled this...

My organization is having a guild luncheon and the wives of many of our constituents are invited. How do I go about linking the gift and entering the wife as participating when she does not have her own constituent record?

I am drawing an absolute blank this afternoon and would appreciate any and all suggestions!

Thanks,
Stacey

[Matthew]

You can't.

Each wife must each have her own constituent record to be added to the event.

[Melissa Siobhan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Matthew

You can't.

Each wife must each have her own constituent record to be added to the event.

However, not everyone does that. What you may want to consider is does the husband really need to be the "constituent" or can you flip flop them? if you really have the relationship with the wife and she attends events maybe the record should eb in her name. If not and you do not wish to create spouse records for whatever valid reason you may have you have other options although none really will ever provide a link to that spouse record.

What we do is link the husband to the event and mark him as not participating and do not seat. I then add a guest to his participant record with the name of the wife in it to his record and mark her as participating and seat her. It is not linked to her spouse record (a flaw in RE's system) but it is linked to the constituent at least and it works nonetheless.

[smoore]

Matthew and Melissa,

Thanks for the responses. I am in favor of having the constituent record changed to reflect the wife on BIO1 or providing the wives with their own constituent record.

However until I get a chance to make some major changes to the database I will do as you suggested Melissa!

Thanks,
Stacey

[Matthew]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Melissa Siobhan

What we do is link the husband to the event and mark him as not participating and do not seat. I then add a guest to his participant record with the name of the wife in it to his record and mark her as participating and seat her. It is not linked to her spouse record (a flaw in RE's system) but it is linked to the constituent at least and it works nonetheless.

one drawback to this approach is you have no way of tracking all events the wife has attended.

[Melissa Siobhan]

That is a drawback and I did say that the event gues it NOT linked to the spouse. What we do is if we ever do create a separate record for her (they divorce, he dies or she needs her own record for any other reason) we go through his events and link them to that newly created record. We do not do a ton of events so this takes no time in the rare instance where we do this.

I agree it is not perfect database management but I am not a fan of spouse records because RE does not handle Spouse soft credits well.

What is frustrating is that the Events module lets you register somone who is not a constituent at all but will not let you link a relationship to a participant. I think it is wrong.

[dyednwool]

I just ran into an interesting situation last week with event participant records -- which inclines me to have constituent records for all event participants.

We had a somewhat unusual scenario where we wanted to send an invitation out to around 300+ people, then ask them which individual event (there were 10 small events throughout the state) they wished to attend.

So we created a master event record so all the event invitees could be added in order to send out the intiial invitation. We then created the 10 individula event records and when the RSVP's were received they were recorded in these individual event records.

After it was all over, we needed to do some analysis around how many were initially invited and what percent didn't respond/RSVP'd/attended. So I thought I could do this with merge queries -- however, when I did the participant merge queries I didn't get the correct results.

Turns out that participant records are really unique records for each event -- so the participant record for Mr. Smith for Event A and participant record for Mr. Smith for Event B are totally separate -- I wanted Mr. Smith to be removed during the merge.

There might have been a better way to initially set up the master & individula events, but based on how I had structured it the only way I could get to the information was through CONSTITUENT queries. So I first had to check for anyone who was "typed in" as a participant vs. linked to their constituent record. Fortunately there was only one -- so I created a constituent record for them and was then able to do the merge queries using constituent records vs. participant records.

Also -- I thought with RE version 7.8 because you can now link/share relationships that you'd be able to search and link for a relationship into the event -- but I don't think you can?

Any comments? I'm glad I realized this before delivering my events training!!

[Elaine Tucker]

There is a field in event called "group"... if you had made the Overall Event the parent group and then added all the individual events as sub-events that should have connected Mr. Smith to all events, without duplicating them.

Someone please correct me if I'm mistaken.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dyednwool

I just ran into an interesting situation last week with event participant records -- which inclines me to have constituent records for all event participants.

We had a somewhat unusual scenario where we wanted to send an invitation out to around 300+ people, then ask them which individual event (there were 10 small events throughout the state) they wished to attend.

So we created a master event record so all the event invitees could be added in order to send out the intiial invitation. We then created the 10 individula event records and when the RSVP's were received they were recorded in these individual event records.

After it was all over, we needed to do some analysis around how many were initially invited and what percent didn't respond/RSVP'd/attended. So I thought I could do this with merge queries -- however, when I did the participant merge queries I didn't get the correct results.

Turns out that participant records are really unique records for each event -- so the participant record for Mr. Smith for Event A and participant record for Mr. Smith for Event B are totally separate -- I wanted Mr. Smith to be removed during the merge.

There might have been a better way to initially set up the master & individula events, but based on how I had structured it the only way I could get to the information was through CONSTITUENT queries. So I first had to check for anyone who was "typed in" as a participant vs. linked to their constituent record. Fortunately there was only one -- so I created a constituent record for them and was then able to do the merge queries using constituent records vs. participant records.

Also -- I thought with RE version 7.8 because you can now link/share relationships that you'd be able to search and link for a relationship into the event -- but I don't think you can?

Any comments? I'm glad I realized this before delivering my events training!!

[dyednwool]

We are on version 7.6 so don't have this Group/Sub-event feature I
believe ....