Constituent and Relationship Management

Watch a brief video (6:00 mins) demonstration of some Contact Management features in Common Ground

Tracking your contacts and relationships efficiently is job #1 in Common Ground.  By partnering with Salesforce.com and developing Common Ground on top of their Salesforce CRM product, nonprofits have an incredibly robust contact management solution for storing all demographic details, including from custom fields; as well as, all notes, attachments and detailed correspondence.  To improve the Salesforce CRM product for use by nonprofits, we've developed numerous features that will help your staff build stronger relationships and improve the integrity of your data.

Constituent Management

• Automatic Householding - every contact is added to a household.  For new contacts created the household is created automatically with the contact as the only user. 
• Giving summary calculations - for every individual contact we auto-calculate their giving totals with a variety of metrics like: most recent gift, lifetime total, YTD total, last year total, largest gift amount, etc.  These summary values are also rolled up for every household providing a quick snapshot of the collective investment all members of a household have contributed.
• Mailing address synchronization - with a single click a contact's mailing address can be pushed to all other members of a household, or vice versa.
• Related addresses - we built a tool that can optionally automatically record every address change and maintain an inventory of all prior addresses.  This feature can also be used to record other types of addresses like seasonal address records. 
• Contact classifications – classifications organize the categories of engagement between constituents and the nonprofit, helping keep track of "donors", "volunteers", "board members", etc. in a systematic way.  These classifications integrated with Convio's Online Marketing tools for top level segmentation.

Relationship Management

Successful fundraising is about building relationships.  Common Ground not only helps your organization track your relationship details with each constituent, but also the relationships between constituents, or constituents and organizations, or organizations and other organizations. Tracking this web of relationships helps your staff communicate more effectively, build stronger relationships and leverage your supporters network.

• Custom Relationship Types - are they "friends", "coworkers", or "partners"? Use one of the numerous types in Common Ground or create your own to match the types of relationships you choose to capture.
• Identify Key Relationships - indicate spouse/domestic partner and employer to restrict duplicates and improve data integrity.  Also flag specific relationships as key to ensure these appear above all others in results.
• Soft credit rules - determine gift soft credit rules on each relationship, whether uni-directional or bi-directional, which are then automatically applied when either party in the relationship makes a gift.
• Group by type - view all relationships in an expandable tree or group each by type to simplify navigation.

Duplicate Management

• Identify by specific field values or complex match keys - choose any field, whether standard or custom to look for potential duplicates or use a pre-built match key which combines multiple field values to identify likely duplicates or create your own custom match key.
• Normalized last name search - compare the raw elements of a contact's last name as potential dupes.  This normalization process helps to identify dupes even when two names are spelled slightly different.
• Restrict duplicates within an account - choose whether to include household or organizational account contacts in your dupe search.
• Limit search based on created date - enter a "created since" date to reduce the search results and focus on your most recent constituent records.
• Mark as "not duplicate" - choose a returned group of records and mark the group or a subset of the results as not duplicates to remove them from future review.
• Combine values from multiple contacts - create a consolidated contact record by choosing the surviving field values from all potential matches to merge.
• Retain all related information - when merged, the surviving contact will preserve all related donations, activities and more from the duplicate records, creating a unified consolidated master contact.