How to update a household record when one member passes away

If you’ve been managing a couple in a household record and one person passes away, how do you now manage their record in your LGL database? In this article, we’ll share some best practices for ensuring the record reflects the data correctly as well as a suggestion on how to inform your organization of recently deceased constituents and keep your database updated.

Using constituent records to manage household data

One of the most frequently asked questions from new customers is how to best manage household data in LGL. Given the flexibility to use an individual constituent record to represent a single person, a couple, or even an entire family, our users often ask: “Should we create a single record to manage a couple (or household) in LGL or should we create a separate record for each family member and connect them together through the use of Relationships?”

This can be a pretty complex question, and the answer can vary depending on the relationship you have with that particular constituent or household, as well as how they prefer for you to communicate with them.

As a matter of fact, it is such an important conversation that we address it early on in our Basic Training course. We also provide a comprehensive article about the topic in our Knowledge Base: Managing households in LGL.

An important thing to note is the solution doesn’t have to be “one size fits all,” meaning that you can choose to store some households within a single record and others using multiple records connected via Relationships. Be sure to use the free resources mentioned above, review the pros and cons of each approach, and determine what works best for your nonprofit organization. Once you land on what the process will be, we recommend documenting and adding it to your LGL standard operating procedures (SOP) manual.

Updating a household record when a member passes away

In this article, we are addressing the case where a single constituent record is being used to track the household. (If instead you have been using two records to track a household and one member has passed away, the solution is simpler; just mark the deceased record accordingly.)

To illustrate, let’s consider two different scenarios, the first based on updating a record for a highly engaged couple with strong ties to your nonprofit and the second for a low-engaged couple who haven’t been actively involved with your organization.

Scenario 1: How to update a constituent record for a highly engaged couple with a recently deceased member

John and Mary Smith have been active supporters of your nonprofit for the last 20 years. They have given jointly and have served on multiple committees over the years. They are well-connected with your organization and well-respected in the community. You’ve maintained regular communication with each and have documented many contact reports in their household record. You wish to preserve their historical interactions with your organization and also to ensure your future communications with the surviving spouse/partner are accurate.

In this scenario, our recommended approach would be to clone the household record so that you will have one record for Mary Smith and a second one for John Smith, who is now deceased. The benefit of cloning the record is that all their joint gift data and contact reports will appear in both of their records (with one constituent’s gifts showing as soft credits). This preserves your organization’s institutional memory, and it provides a way to more easily manage any future gifts to be made in memory of the deceased member (in this example, John).

The steps to update a joint record when you need to preserve the deceased’s history are well documented in our Knowledge Base article. The article covers a variety of topics, including adding deceased data, soft crediting of gifts, managing communication preferences in the cloned record, and making addressee and salutation updates in the surviving spouse/partner record.

Scenario 2: Updating a record for a low-engagement couple when a member passes away

Paul and Sally Jones were invited to your organization’s annual event several years ago and have attended on and off over the years. They receive your organization’s communications, and occasionally they open and respond to emails and solicitations. When they give, they do so jointly. They are not deeply connected to your organization’s mission. Sally recently passed away, and you want to ensure that their record accurately reflects this information.

In this scenario, our recommended approach would be to simply update the existing household record in two places. First, update the “Marital status” field with the value “Widowed” and update the “Addressee/Label Name” and “Salutation” fields to reflect the status change of the surviving spouse/partner. You can also choose to add a note in the “Spouse/partner” field with the word “deceased” to give more visibility to that data.

The updated record in LGL would look like this:

How can my nonprofit keep up with documenting newly deceased constituents?

Knowing how to make updates to records for deceased members in a household record and documenting your procedures for future LGL users are important steps to maintaining a clean database. But, how can you on-goingly keep your data updated with deceased constituents? One simple way is to regularly check local obituary notices (either in print or online) and make updates immediately. The school I worked with many years ago found this was a task they could ask of the school secretary, but you may have a volunteer or another person knowledgeable about your nonprofit’s supporters who can assist. If you want a more automated process, a platform like TrueGivers can provide an append service for a fee. You can learn more about the service and the integration TrueGivers built with Little Green Light here.