Creating relationships between constituents

In this article:

Overview

You can use constituent relationships in Little Green Light to document and report on significant, important relationships for those constituents. Examples include spousal relationships, parent/child relationships, other primary family relationships, and employer-to-key-important-employee relationships.

Other possible options include relationships between a constituent and a family foundation or family business, mentor/mentee, or key friend categories. Another we recommend is setting up relationships between a donor and their donor-advised fund.

NOTE:

  1. We do not recommend using relationships to track, for example, current or past employees of a company or congregants of a religious organization. These can be tracked using custom constituent categories.
  2. While there isn’t a technical limit on the number of relationships any constituent can have in Little Green Light, the functionality is designed to handle up to 10 relationships very well. This number generally accommodates adding relationships between a typical number of immediate family members.

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.

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