Relationship Types

Return to Administrator's Guide

Relationship Types

Relationship Types Overview

Relationships allow you to maintain information on the relationship shared by contacts. Examples include:

• Information for Individual Contacts about siblings, spouses, parents, children, employers, etc.
• Information for Organizational Contacts about employees, boards, affiliates, parent or child organizations, etc.
• Information for Household Contacts about household members, head of household, etc.

Any two contacts can be assigned a Relationship Type once that relationship is configured.

Relationships require that BOTH contacts in a relationship be given a label to describe their role in that relationship. For instance with an employee-employer relationship there must be one contact who is the employee and another contact (often an Organization) that is the employer.

You can have one-to-many and many-to-one relationships, so organizations can have many employees or volunteers, teachers can have many students, parents can have many children.

Relationships can be assigned one at a time, meaning you must go to each child and indicate a relationship to a parent, but you can assign relationships in batches by applying an "action" to a set of search results.

Relationship Types must be CONFIGURED before they can be applied to contacts.

See: Configure Relationship Types and Apply Relationships to Contacts.