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Author: Kristenson, Joel
Last Updated: 2016-09-19
Overview
This article walks through the steps to link contact records in your database together through relationships. This is different than tracking household relationships – some examples include the tracking of employees at a corporation, or linking the owner of a business to their business.
Also covered is how to query by relationships (example: You can pull up a corporation, and all of the employees who work at the corporation into the same search query.)
In 2016 there were some major updates to the relationship module:
- You can now create your own relationship types that are different than the list of system defaults
- You can set a date range on a relationship (ex: this person worked at the company for this long)
- The steps to delete a relationship have also changed slightly
Steps
Navigate to your Contacts list (Voter/Donor). Search for and open the record you want to create a relationship for. I used the Cargill Company in this example.
Navigate to the Relation tab. Here you can view/modify the current relationships for this record. Click [+ New] to begin creating a new one.
Search for the contact you’re adding a relationship for, and click [Select]. *If the contact doesn’t exist you’ll need to create a new one. In this example I searched for myself ‘Joel Kristenson’ which was already in the database.
Select the relationship type from the drop-down if it exists. You can now click the [+] button to create your own relationship types if you need to. You can also record a note, and a date for the relationship.
Click [Save] once you’re finished. In my example I select the relationship type of employee, recorded a start date, and a simple note.
Here’s my finished example list of relationships in the Cargill Co. record card.
If you ever need to delete or modify relationships you’ll start by clicking on the blue relationship ‘ID’ hyperlink. In my example I clicked on ID #4 for Elizabeth Albrecht.
Click the red [X] at the top of the popup screen to delete the relationship. You can also modify the data and save again if that’s your intent. In this example I deleted the relationship.
Click [OK] when prompted, if you wish to proceed.
Here’s my finished example after the relationship was purged.
The next steps show how to query by relationships.
Navigate to your Contacts (Voters/Donors) list.
Query for your contact, in my example I used Cargill again.
Click on the [+ Include Other] button on the Search Tool Strip.
Below are descriptions for the different options you have in this area.
Include Other Contacts Options
- Include other contacts in household.
o If you’ve previously run householding, you can use this option to pull up just the people who are part of the contact’s household.
- Include other contacts with same home address.
o This is a good option if you haven’t yet householded your database, more typical for large voter databases.
- Include contacts connected through relationship records.
o Choose from specific or multiple relationship types to query by i.e. Employer, Employee, Business Owner, Cousin, Colleague, All Relationship Types, etc.
For the purpose of this article, you’ll skip the first two options, and just check the 3rd box for ‘Include contacts connected through relationship records’.
You’ll notice that by default all the relationship types are checked, which isn’t a bad option if you want to pull up any record that is linked to the original record you searched by. For this example I cleared all check boxes using the sweeper brush button, and just checked the box for Employee [of Employer]. Click [OK] once you’ve made your selection. You’ll still need to click [Search] on the following screen to update the list of records in the grid.
Click [Search] to refresh your query. I was returned with a total record count of 6 (1 corporation, and 5 ‘linked’ employee records).
Note: To view a list of all your relationships and further analyze them you can view the Relationships list under the Application Menu. In my example I had 328.
TIP: A little trick to quickly get a list of other records that share the same home address as the record you’ve searched for in your list is to simply right-click on the record which will bring up a context menu with a few options, one of which is to list all other contacts that live at that address. Here’s an example (3 images) for Christopher Alden:
Img 1 of 3 – pull up a contact into your list
Img 2 of 3 – right-click and select to list all other contacts at that same address
Img 3 of 3 – all contacts at that address will populate in the grid, in this ex it was a total of 5 people
The related resources below link to a variety of other videos and articles related to this topic.
Related Resources
Article: Delete a Relationship
Article: How to Split a Single Contact Record into a Duplicate Contact Record for Householding a Couple
Article: Splitting ‘Couples’ into Separate Records En Masse using the Built-In Utility
Article: Managing Households – Creating, Deleting, and Re-creating
Article: Automatically Conform Addresses
Article: Address Management
Article: Why won’t some of my records merge?
Article: Address Normalization (unlimited addresses per person)
Article: Save and Load a Search Query as a (Dynamic) Search Favorite
Article: SQL Wildcards
Article: Advanced Queries – the SQL Tab
Article: Delete Saved Search Queries
Video: Households – What To Do B4 Householding!!
Video: Households – Delete and Recreate
Video: How to Manage Duplicates
Video: Households – Drag n Drop
Video: Households – Combine More Than 5 Members
Video: Video Playlist on Queries
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