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Author: Kristenson, Joel
Last Updated: 2017-05-02
Overview
This article will teach you how to manually create and manage households. This article demonstrates how to perform this task from scratch, without running the automated household utility prior.
*If you’ve already householded your database using the automated utility this article can still be useful if you need to remove someone from a household (e.g. they passed away), manually add another member, or if you need to further customize the household envelope/salutation names to use when printing through Trail Blazer.
Tip: Watch this video to learn what to do before householding, and read section #2 of this article to learn how to automatically household your database.
Steps
Navigate to the Households list.
Click [+ New] from the search tool strip. It’s not a bad idea to run a search query by the household name to verify that the household doesn’t exist already.
Fill out the fields for Name, Salutation Name, and Envelope Name. Click [Save] once you’re finished. My example is below which demonstrates the typical naming convention that’s used in Trail Blazer for households.
Click [+ New] to begin adding members to the household.
Run a search for the contact and select them from the list. If they don’t exist you’ll need to click [+ New] to add them. My example is below where the person already existed.
Click [OK] when prompted.
Repeat this step until all members of the household are added. In my example I added one more person.
Click [Save and Close] once you’re finished.
You can search the households list to view the new household you created.
That concludes the steps.
Continue reading to learn how to view household relationships within a contact’s record card and how to open the household record to modify it from there.
Navigate to the Contacts (Voters/Donors) list, query for the person you created a household for and open their record card.
Navigate to the Households tab to view who is part of the household. You can click the green household button at the top of the record card to view/modify the household record further. That button won’t be activated until you’ve created a household for the contact.
The related resources below link to a variety of articles and videos related to this topic.
Related Resources
Article: Managing Households – Creating, Deleting and Re-Creating
Article: How to Run a Household Export of Contact (Voter/Donor) Data to a .CSV Spreadsheet
Article: How to Set an Attribute for All Members of a Household En Masse
Article: How to Print Household Labels
Article: Creating your Own Custom Relationship Types – 2016 Upgrade
Article: Automatically Conform Addresses
Article: Splitting ‘Couples’ into Separate Records En Masse using the Build-In Utility
Article: How to Split a Single Contact Record into a Duplicate Contact Record for Householding a Couple
Article: How to Create a Year-End Tax Letter Addressed to Individuals or the Entire Household using Merge Fields – Nonprofit Only
Article: How to Print Mail-Merge Address Labels
Article: How to Print Envelopes
Video: Households – What To Do B4 Households!!
Video: Households – Delete and Recreate
Video: Households – Drag n Drop
Video: Households – Combine More Than 5 Members
Video: Writer Letter – Edit Letter after Mail Merge
Video: Year End Tax Letter
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