Creating relationships between employees and organizations

Overview

Relationships in Little Green Light are designed to help you understand a constituent and all their important connections to other constituents in your database. For example, they'd typically be used for primary corporate contacts and family members. They're not designed to help you track all current or past employees of an organization or all members of a congregation.

How many relationships can I set up for each constituent?

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 relationships between a typical number of immediate family members and super-important employees (e.g., primary contact, CEO, the person who manages the grants at your grant organization). Using more than 10 relationships for any one constituent can lead to slower and less effective search and page load times.

When it is appropriate to set up employee/employer relationships?

The short FAQ here explains how and when it is appropriate to use a relationship to connect an individual and an organization record through a relationship.

Should I use relationships to track members of an organization?

No. The reason why you wouldn’t want to use a relationship to track the member of an organization (for example, a religious organization such as a church, synagogue or mosque) is because this type of connection can be easily and more effectively tracked using a constituent category.

Should I use relationships to track employees of an organization or company?

No. For the same reasons explained in the answer provided above, we recommend against doing this. These are cases where, unless you need to be in direct contact with that person, there is no need to set up a relationship. You can instead place this data in the Employer field within an individual constituent record or in the Contact Name field in an organization constituent record. For example, for a constituent who works at Microsoft and is not your primary contact there, enter “Microsoft” as the employer name in their record.

How to set up relationships between organization and individual records

It’s common to have several employees in your database that work for the same organization. What’s the best way to set them up in LGL? In the scenario shown here, we have three employees who are employed by ABC Foundation. What we want to do in LGL is create a constituent record for each one and show that they’re related.

Create the organization and individual records and link them together

Start by creating an organization record for ABC Foundation, using the name of your primary contact person there. In this example, Jeremy Stone is the person we work with most closely, so we’ll enter his name as the contact person.

Add additional relationships with the organization

For the executive director, Joan Appleton, we’ll create an individual record, but we'll still associate her with ABC Foundation using the Organization name field.

We'll also add a relationship for Joan to ABC Foundation; we're listing ABC Foundation as her employer and Joan's relationship as Executive Director (you could also use "employee"). While you're doing this, you can also share address and phone information; in this example, we are copying the address for ABC Foundation to Joan’s record.

Next we'll create a similar record for Amy Hall as Communications Director.

In the end, we'll have an organization record for ABC Foundation that has Jeremy Stone as the contact person, which is linked to the records for Joan (executive director), Amy (communications director), as well as to Jeremy Stone's individual record (if a separate record was/is created for Jeremy).

NOTE: If Jeremy Stone makes a personal gift to your organization, you will need to create another constituent record for him, so that you can keep his personal gifts separate from ABC Foundation’s gifts.