Household (Account)

A household is a special type of organization that allows you to group several individuals who typically live at the same address. The primary use is to understand the total giving from a single household. Gifts are still hard-credited to an individual household member, however, Causeview household rollups show you the total giving for all members of the household. This is useful in understanding the effect of families who collectively interact with your organization. Households are a special type of organization as they cannot be the donor of a gift. A donor can either be an individual or a formal organization. The automatic household-ing setting can be used to have Causeview automatically create a household when an individual is created.

 All of the individuals who are grouped into a household should have the same address, although alternate addresses can also be specified for the individuals on their detail page. For each individual a household role can be specified, to better map the connections between your contacts.

Households can be created before or after the individuals who will make up the members. If the household is created first, new individuals can be created in the household creation page. If the individuals exist in Causeview before the household is created, they can be added using the household creation page, or the household can be added by editing the individual. While members of a household will usually have a relationship with one another, a direct connection in Causeview is not automatically created.

Article: How to Create Households 

 Difference between households and relationships

Households and relationships in Causeview both allow you to track the different ways that your constituents interact with one another, and help you to better understand and work with your constituent network. Households and relationships are both centred around individuals but they behave very differently. Essentially, households are a method of grouping together individuals who all live at the same address, while relationships are connections between individuals who have some form of relationship beyond your organization.

It may help to imagine placing individuals in households as drawing a circle around all of those individuals. The circle can hold several individuals, so you can group together all of their information - including their giving and fundraising history - to see collective totals. Information and statistics for a household can be viewed from the household detail page. Relationships, on the other hand, are more like lines or strings tying together individuals who have a connection like friendship or being coworkers. Each individual can have relationships with many other people, and those people don’t have to be connected or share any similarities with one another. All of an individual’s relationships show up in the relationships related list on the individual’s detail page, and are also more graphically shown using the Relationship Viewer.