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Affiliations/Members Tab

In most cases, the Affiliations tab will appear on the Contacts screen for a particular contact record. Affiliations include any links that exist between people or organizations and other organizations. This includes affiliations between people and employers, schools, churches, civic clubs, and so forth.

If a contact record includes an organization name in the Organization field, this tab automatically switches to the Members tab, and the number of members affiliated with the organization is shown in parentheses next to the Members column label.

Keystone provides a means of switching between viewing the organization's members (using the Members tab) and viewing the organization's affiliations (using the Affiliations tab). An organization’s affiliations include any other relationships between the organization and other organizations.

For example, some organizations belong to national trade groups, which may have an office in your area. To switch between the tabs, click the View Affiliations button while viewing the organization's members, or click the View Members button while viewing the organization's affiliations.

• Note that the fields on both of these tabs are navigation fields. Double-clicking them will take you to the associated Organization or Member.

The Affiliations Tab

The Affiliations tab allows you to indicate membership or affiliation of a person with an organization or an organization with other organizations. You can specify as many affiliations as you want for any contact. These affiliations may include a contact’s employer, school, church, and so forth.

Affiliations are made with the organization’s contact record that is marked as the Primary Contact. If only one contact record contains a particular organization’s name, regardless of whether a person is included in the record, that record will serve as the primary contact.

If the organization’s name exists within the contact records of more than one person, whichever one is marked as the Primary Contact will be the record with which all affiliations are made. Organizations that are not the Primary Contact will have neither an Affiliations nor a Members tab. Also see "Affiliations and Organizational Contacts" at the end of this section.

If you only see the Members tab, open the Members tab and click the View Affiliations button to switch views.

To record an affiliation for a contact on the Affiliations tab

1. Select the contact in the upper-right corner of the Contacts screen and move to a new record line on the Affiliations tab.
2. Select from the Contact drop-down list the contact you want to affiliate with the contact you selected in step 1.
   
   If this contact is a person or persons, select 1, 2, or Both, to indicate whether the first, second, or both individuals in this contact record are part of the affiliation. If this contact is another organization, select Org to indicate that this organization is part of the affiliation.
3. Select from the Organization field's drop-down list the organization with which this contact is affiliated.
   
   If an organization appears multiple times, it is due to more than one organization record for that organization being designated as the Primary Contact.
4. Enter any additional information about the affiliation into the Notes field as needed.

The Members tab

The Members tab shows all contacts recorded as members of a selected organization.

If you only see the Affiliations tab, open the Affiliations tab and click the View Members button to switch views.

To add a member of an organization on the Members tab

1. Click the Add/Delete Member button to open the Add Affiliation Member window.
2. Select the Type of member to be added.
   This is either Person(s) or Organization.
3. Select from the Name drop-down list field the name of the member you want to add.
4. If the name of the new member has two people (both Person1 and Person2) in their contact record, select whether Person1, Person2, or Both participate in the affiliation.
5. Enter any additional information about the member into the Notes field as needed.
6. Click the Add Member button.
7. If you would like to add another member, repeat these instructions. Otherwise, click the Close button.

An E-Mail button is displayed when members are shown. This allows you to send e-mails to members of an organization. See the E-mail Button section for details on creating Outlook e-mails.

Affiliations and Organizational Contacts

One method of linking a person with an organization is to put them both in the same contact record. For example, you could have a contact record with Terrence Russell as the person and Russell Heating and Electric as the organization. In cases where you are entering the company or organization into Keystone only once with just the one contact person, this may be the best way of doing it.

However, in cases where you want to capture the fact that an organization has several employees or many members, you should use the Affiliations tab to link the people with the organization. This is even more important for organizations where some members may come and go regularly, such as volunteer organizations or churches.

Ideally, you would create only one organization record without any person in it and then create individual records for each employee or member with their personal contact information. Once you have done that, you can affiliate each employee or member record with the organization’s record using the instructions above.

While you could add the organization to the Organization field of each of these contact’s records, it is much better when you do not.  Not only does this restrict you from easily affiliating those contacts with other organizations, it is very likely to cause confusion when you try to affiliate any contact with that organization, run reports, or look through member and affiliation lists for possible donor contacts.