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Author: Joel Kristenson
Last Updated: 2016-07-20
Overview
This article walks through the steps to split ‘individual’ records in your database that are currently being used to track a ‘couple’ (ex: Bob and June Smith) into their own separate individual records.
The utility used in this example allows you to run this operation en masse, instead of performing it one-by-one. Once this operation is complete you can link the separate records together through a household relationship for the purpose of thank-you letters and other communications.
Tip: We highly suggest that you track each individual of a household as their own separate records in the database, and then link them through a household relationship. This can be effective for many reasons such as tracking if one member is the main donor, one or the other may have different attributes, and especially if one member has passed away and you want to hide them with a not attribute.
Steps
Navigate to the Contacts (Voters/Donors) list under the Application Menu.
Use an sql wildcard lookup to run a search for individual contacts that have either the word ‘and’ in their First Name field, or the ampersand (&) symbol. You’ll also need to add a ‘/n’ in the Last Name field because it’s *required* that these individual records have a list name present in order for this operation to work. My example is below which produced 20 contacts that were tracking a ‘couple’ in an individual record card.
Tip: If this is a task you think you’ll need to come back to, or perform again the future, it’s a good idea to save this query as one of your favorites for future use.
To bring up the ‘splitting’ utility follow File > Utilities > Split Couples into Separate Contacts…
Click [OK] to proceed if you’re 100% that you want to go forward with the splitting of couples in the list.
You’ll get a popup message when the operation is complete, click [OK] to finish. In my example all 20 couples were split into separate records.
If you run the same search query as used in the first steps the count should now equal zero (if you ran the operation on the entire list), my example is shown below.
Take a look at the related resources below to learn about householding and other similar tools in Trail Blazer.
Related Resources
Article: Managing Households – Creating, Deleting and Re-Creating
Article: Households – Creating, Deleting, Re-creating
Article: Household Automatic vs User Managed
Article: Household Record Count
Article: Household Records when Last Names are Different
Article: Household Export
Article: Find Possible Duplicates
Article: How to Find Duplicate Contact Records by Identical *Primary* Email Address, and Automatically Merge them Together
Article: SQL Wildcards
Video: Households – What To Do B4 Householding!!
Video: Households – Delete and Recreate
Video: Households – Drag n Drop
Video: How to Manage Duplicates
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