[ARice]

Hello All,

Could anyone comment on their organization's standards/procedure for creating organization records in RE? I am specifically trying to find out the best practice for when to create a separate record for a company that is tied to a larger company. Example: we work with many pharmaceutical companies, and often times we work with different businesses/divisions of the larger company, each of which has a different mailing address and primary contact. I don't want to create a separate record for each business tied to the larger company, as this gets very confusing when crediting gifts, deciding where to enter actions, etc... However, I recognize that there has to be some point at which there needs to be a separate record. Does anyone have experience with this issue?

My many thanks in advance.

AR

[Peter Gulka]

The rule of thumb we used at my previous org was if we were going to ask a
branch/subsidiary/whatever directly for a gift they neede dtheir own record.
Try this scenario:


Company X has a huge chain of franchises. If we ask the head office for
$1,000,000 that goes on a different record from franchise #54693 of Company
X whose manager grduated from our school and who gives $500 a year towards a
scholarship. Different donors, different stewardship needs. Different
recognition potentially as well.

[ARice]

Good stuff Peter, thanks for the thoughts. That is the standard I was leaning toward. How about this: what if the division/business of the larger company is a prospect and we want to record the history of the relationship via actions, but we haven't gotten to asking for a gift yet? This issue came up this week when one of our major gift officers requested that we create a separate record for a division of a large pharmaceutical company with whom she is in contact. We already have a record for the parent organization. Would creating a relationship record work best, and just record the actions on the parent organization record?

[Matthew]

if you do not create a separate record to record the interactions with the separate division, you will be unable to easily tell which actions were with which divisions.

[dyednwool]

So now that you've created separate records for the parent and the
divisions, do you use the Parent/Subsidiary feature on Org 2 or do you
create a Parent/Subsidiary relationship and do it there?

[Peter Gulka]

@dyednwool - you do both. The system SHOULD automatically create a
relationship when the Parent field is used, but it doesn't.

[ARice]

Good point Peter - doing both would ensure the best possible historical record. Even though creating multiple records might unavoidably cause some confusion, a separate record is required so as to be clear on the actions for each division/subsidiary. As long as the parent/subsidiary is properly marked on org 2, and the proper relationship is created, it should be clear enough where the relationships are and what took place.

Maybe the standard could be this - if a gift may potentially come from the subsidiary and not from the parent corporation, then a record should be created. Not a subjective standard by any means as it relies on the major gift officer to essentially make a guess on that point, but at least its some guideline whereas before we had none.

[RobertWild]

Followup question:

When recording employees, do you record the employee to the parent org or the sub-unit? Thinking of a University with different Schools / Faculties / Departments.

[ARice]

My thinking is that you record employees under the dept if there is a separate record for that dept in RE. Universities are a different animal and would probably warrant a different standard vs. a corporation or organization. Any of our university experts out there wanna weigh in on this?

[Doug Creek]

University person (with multiple campuses, which is even more fun)...

We record ours to the campus they work at, with an attribute that tell us what department they work at. The fun ones are those that have more then one department (ie, temp faculty that teach across departments, etc). We actually have 4 department attributes running off the same table for those...

For organizations, we would create the record that we are dealing with, and if we happen to know its the "subsidiary" of XYZ corp already in the database, we link them.

Doug

[ARice]

Doug - do you have a restriction or standard by which you decide whether or not to create an organization record for organizations? What is your guidance to development officers when they are entering action information for an organization with subsidiaries as separate records in your database?