Creating relationships between constituents

In this article:

As you develop and deepen your personal relationships with your constituents, the need to manage constituents as individuals increases. Making the decision to track your constituents as individuals hinges on the ability to effectively manage relationships.

Adding and editing relationships

LGL provides a simple yet flexible way to create relationships between constituents. 

On every constituent details page, you will see a Related Constituents section. You can add new relationships by clicking the Add relationships button or the Edit relationships button (if any relationships are already defined):

You can also edit relationships for a constituent from within search results on the Constituents tab by clicking the Actions button for that constituent:

This will open the relationships for the constituent, where you can edit existing relationship/s and add one or more additional relationships.

When you add another relationship, you can select another constituent (find the record in the database or create a new one) for this relationship, and then define the nature of the relationship:

You can add as many relationships as you want by clicking the Add another relationship button for as many as you need to add. You can change the order in which they appear by dragging them up and down the list:

If you ever need to change a relationship, just edit the relationship, rename the values describing the relationship, and save your changes.

You can also edit relationships for a constituent from within search results, as shown here:

Employee-employer relationships

This help article on employee-employer relationships explains another type of relationship you might want to track in LGL.

Removing relationships

To remove a relationship, click the Edit relationships button and then click the Remove button:

Then click Save to update the constituent record and remove the relationship.

Sharing contact information between related constituents

You can share address and phone number information from the primary record to the related record.

Shared contact information will automatically appear on the related constituent's record, and it will be updated whenever you change that information for the source constituent.

NOTE: In order for an address to be sharable using this method, it must be marked as such and the appropriate address type must also be selected. An example of this is shown in the screenshot above.

Relationships and related gifts

When entering a gift for a constituent that has related records associated with it, you can choose from a drop-down menu of related constituents to add a related gift.

NOTE: If the constituent to whom you'd like to add a related gift is not yet in your database or is not yet related to your donor, you can choose to add a new constituent or find an existing one.

Once selected, you can choose what type of related gift you'd like to add (soft credit, peer credit, or matching). Read more about related gifts.

Related Articles