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Relationships Tab

The Relationships tab allows you to link contacts together by defining relationships between any contacts in Keystone. This may include setting up relationships between parents and children, donors and their friends, people who play golf together on Saturdays, and nearly any other relationship you can conceive of. This tab is for people-to-people relationships. To enter relationships between people and organizations, use the Affiliations/Members tab.

Once entered, these relationships can be viewed with respect to either party in the relationship. For example, William Jackson is John Black's uncle. You would want William’s record to show that he is John’s uncle. Likewise you would want John’s record to show that he is William’s nephew. Therefore, it is important to include enough information in the relationship definition so that it can be understood from either record.

In this example, if the relationship was simply defined as Nephew it would be ambiguous. If you were not familiar with these contacts, you wouldn’t know who was the uncle and who was the nephew. A better relationship description would be John is Williams nephew.

Since the apostrophe ( ' ) is a reserved character for some Access database functions, it is best to avoid entering it in any of your data. Hence Williams nephew is less likely to cause problems than William's nephew.

You can double-click on any person in the Relationships pane to open that contact's record. For example, in the relationship example above, if you are viewing John Black's record you can double-click William Jackson's name in the relationship line to open William Jackson's record. Then, if William has a relationship with someone else, you can double-click on that person to go to that person’s record, and so on. In this way you can browse relationships to determine if someone close to your affiliate has a relationship with a prospective donor who can approach that contact with greater likelihood of success.

Defined Relationships Help With Duplicate Addresses

There is only space for two persons on each contact, and in some households there are more than two persons active with your Affiliate. This requires adding an additional contact for these persons using the same mailing address.

To avoid these duplicate addresses from being displayed in the Duplicate Address Report, you may define the relationship and then use the check box on this report to exclude related contacts.

This also can be used for duplicate addresses for businesses run out of the home.

Adding a relationship

1. Click the Add/Modify/Delete button in the Relationships tab.
   This opens the Add/Modify/Delete Relationships window.
2. Enter the person's name that you wish to relate to the contact (the name in the upper left corner of the window) in the Person(s) field in the Add area.
   You can either choose this person from the drop-down list or you can begin typing their name (last name first) to narrow down the list. 
3. Proceed to the Relationship field next to the name and enter a brief description of the relationship.
   The relationship should describe how the person shown in the upper left corner of the window is related to the contact you selected in the Person(s) field. The description should make sense when you view it from the perspective of either contact.
   
   To continue the above example, if you are viewing John Black’s record, the Person(s) field should contain William Jackson, and the Relationship field should have something to the effect of John is Williams nephew.
4. Click the Add button to add this relationship to the contacts.
   You must click the Add button in order to save the relationship.
   
   When you click the Add button the Add pane is reset to blank so that you can add another relationship if needed. When you click Close, you return to the main screen where you will find the relationships that you just entered listed.

Modifying a relationship

1. Click the Add/Modify/Delete button in the Relationships tab.
   This opens the Add/Modify/Delete Relationships window.
2. Change the information in the Person or Relationship fields.
3. Click the Modify button when you have completed your changes.
   You must click the Modify button in order to save your changes. Clicking the Modify button will return you to the main screen.

Deleting a relationship

1. Click the Add/Modify/Delete button in the Relationships tab.
   This opens the Add/Modify/Delete Relationships window.
2. Click the Delete button to delete the record.