How to manage multiple Contacts in one household
In Sumac, there are 3 kinds of Contacts: individuals (a person), organizations (a business, government body, another nonprofit, etc.), and households (a couple or family).
To begin, here is an example of when you might use the Household function in your database:
John Smith is a board member at your organization. His wife Jane Smith makes monthly donations to your organization. They also have a son named Phil who occasionally volunteers for you. They all have individual contact records in your database because you need to keep track of different information for each of them. However, there are some things should describe them as a family. For example, when you send out your newsletter, you want to just send one to the Smith household rather than sending one to each individual at the same address.
To relate all of them as a family, use the Household button. Expand Special Editing and click Households. Sumac asks if you want to create a new household from existing contacts or edit the members of an existing household. Click OK to create a new household.
In the next window, Sumac asks us to choose the members for the new household contact. Click Add Member. Type Smith to find contacts whose last name starts with Smith. Click to select John, Jane, and Phil, then click OK to select the members of the Household. Click OK again to create the Household.
Sumac tells you that the next dialog will show the new household contact, and that we should edit all names and addresses to make sure they are correct for the household. When you click OK, Sumac shows the household contact that it has created from the chosen individuals.
Move through the tabs, and Sumac highlights in red the fields you should probably edit before saving the changes to this Household.
For example, a Household likely does not need a prefix or First Name. And the Last name should be changed to something like Smith Household and the Letter Salutation should be something like “John, Jane and Phil.”
In Communication Preferences, you can specify what information the household should receive. For example, you may want to set all print mailing communication preferences in the Household contact, and give electronic mailing communication preferences to the individuals, since they likely each have their own email addresses.
Note that Sumac automatically created relationships between the Household contact, and each of the individual members to help us keep track of which contacts belong to which household.
Once you're finished editing the household, click OK, to save the new household contact in your database.
A very useful feature of Households is that you’re able to properly manage communication preferences by using the Filter Households command from the Search Type menu when running mailings. This allows you to keep the Households and remove the individual members from your list or keep the individuals and remove the Households.
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