In Donor Management, a “household” is a way to group family members together, and is a useful tool to help easily connect related profiles.

It’s primarily designed to help give you a better picture of a household’s total giving history, but also can help you better personalize your communications for each family – such as customizing salutations within direct mailings.

In most cases, households are created automatically within the system. When contact information is added into Donor Management, a household is automatically created when several contacts have matching physical addresses listed in their individual contact records.

But don’t duplicates get flagged for review if two contact records have matching addresses?

Not quite. Duplicates are flagged for review if two contact records have at least two matching names, addresses, or phone numbers. Contact records that ONLY share an address will be made into a household instead.

Yes! When viewing a contact profile, you should see an option to “Manage Household” under the contact’s name.

Once you’ve clicked “Manage Household,” you should see an “Edit Household” page appear.

Under the section “Who are the members of this household?”, you should see all of the current members of the household – as well as who has been designated the “head” of the household.

You have the option to change who is listed as the head of the household; you can do this by clicking on the arrow button next to the person’s name who you’d like to make the new head of household.

You also have the ability to remove individuals from a household from this drop-down arrow.

You’ll also be asked to provide additional details for this household, such as the “household name.” A household name can be something like “the Pan household,” or “the Pan-Darling household,” etc.

You’ll also be asked to provide an optional “formal” and “informal” greeting for the household.

The “formal” greeting typically is formatted, using the example above, as “Mr. And Mrs. Peter Pan.” However, you can adjust this formal greeting to best fit each individual household.

The “informal” greeting typically lists the names of each member of the household, such as “Peter and Wendy” in our example.

However, you can also adjust this to best suit the preferences of each respective household. For example, some contacts may prefer that their informal greeting and their formal greeting remain the same.

Once you’ve filled out the necessary details, you can click the blue “Update & Save” button, and the page should reload with a confirmation that your changes have been updated.

You should also now be able to see additional information about the entire household, such as information on the total household’s giving or shared communication-related details.

No, they don’t! We understand that some household members may not live at the same address, so when adding contacts to the same household manually, you don’t need their physical addresses to match.

There may be some instances where you'd like to export a list of the households in your system - like pulling information for an upcoming phone campaign. You probably don't want to end up calling different family members for the same appeal - so generating a list of households might be helpful in this instance.

To do this, you'll want to follow the steps to export a full set of contacts from your system.

Once the pop-up appears that allows you to select which fields you're including in your export, you'll want to find the small "toggle" option below those fields labeled "Export as households."

By selecting this option, your export will several additional fields that aren't included on a standard export file. Those fields include: