Best practices: Using Groups in conjunction with class-year affiliation fields
In this article:
Overview
Special consideration should be paid to managing groups for schools. In this article, we review best practices for using groups and class-year affiliation fields to track students, alumni, parents, and grandparents.
How to use groups and class-year affiliation together
If you choose to create group values to identify students, parents, or grandparents, we recommend doing so at a high level. In other words, if you want to identify those who are or have been a parent at your school, a group value for "Parent" makes sense. The benefit of this approach is that you'll quickly be able to see the number of student or parent records you have in the database by viewing filters on the All Constituents page.
But, if you are trying to differentiate your current parents from your past parents, we suggest using class-year affiliations fields in addition to or instead of a "Parent" group value. This is preferable over creating "Current parent" and "Past parent" values because that approach requires manually updating groups as students enter and leave your school, which can become labor intensive over time.
Example record using "Parent" group value in addition to "Class Year" fields
We strongly recommend using class-year fields to track the year that the student graduates. Doing this allows you to search your database for students or parents of students who are currently attending the school and/or those who have graduated.
Sample search for students who have graduated
