Households – a bit of an audit

Apart from all the technical details and difficulties, for us having Households as a separate entity is a MUST in our market. We need to be able to follow the history of individuals whilst households do transactions with our customers. It is one of the vital strengths of CiviCRM, and we have helped created something like it in another ERP system in the past for the housing corporation market.
So I would add to the benefits of using households a weird one: it matches the way we look at individuals and the relations between individuals in real life?
From a data management point of view, some of the data we collect 'belongs' to individuals: things like name, birth date, gender. Some things we collect 'belong' to households, things like address, relations between the individuals and some financial stuff as sometimes contracts are entered as a household. You could also argue that the house phone in the living room belongs to the household, whereas the mobile in your pocket is individual data. In our house we have a family emailaddress (belonging to household) and individual ones.......as stated, the distinction reflects life?

Erik

Good post Eileen. Couple things --

You can still create a new household "on the fly" when working in an individual record. When you choose to share a household and enter the name of the household, if there is no match Civi recognizes it as a new household. It then exposes the address fields which are inserted into the household record. I think v3.0 that was handled with a modal popup -- it's now done inline.

Re: where data is stored -- what I tell clients across the board with all contact type handling is to attach the related record to the entity that owns it. In other words -- don't overthink. If John Doe is donating and receives a match donation through his company, I would attach the contribution to his record. If the donation clearly comes from him and his wife, I attach to the household record.

Piggy-backing on Erik's last comments -- I think what we ideally would want, but may be tricky to spec such that it doesn't annoy people who don't want it -- is to be able to see some of the related contact sub-records. When I get into John Doe's record, I'd like to see if the Doe Family has made any contributions. And if in the Doe Family record, I'd like to see if John and Jane have records attached independently.

Your comment about using soft credits is viable, but the biggest problem I have is that it requires the user to manually remember that connection. I think the soft credit data model is perfect -- Doe Family has the contribution and John Doe has a soft credit. But if I've already built the household relationship, my expectation is that the "related sub-records" action will happen automatically. I should need to remember, every time I log a contribution, that John is related to Doe Family or to Jane or whatever.

My vote would be to have the ability to turn on/off the "related record" feature, as many orgs would not want it present. If turned on, I would make it universal -- John can see related records for ANY of his relationships (maybe in expandable panels). Or in the settings to choose which relationships will act this way. Households is the obvious one, but there's value in seeing my employer's related records as well, my spouses, and various other relationships.

On your last point about exporting records -- just a note that v3.2 adds the option to merge households on export (previously only available when doing mailing labels). So that helps improve the household function. And the use of the postal greeting and addressee fields provides a place to control how you would greet and mail to households (Doe Family vs. John and Jane Doe, etc.).

Some scattered background comments, not always very specific in their relevance. Perhaps after thinking about this more and reviewing other materials eg 3.3 specs, I'll try to provide more action-oriented, forward directed recommendations. It won't be for at least another 10 days, however.

1) For political and charitable purposes in Canada all payments have to be from a legal entity: a person or corporation (either for profit or non-profit). Household cannot be used for this purpose. However, for fundraising and development, it is very useful to know about total household contributions as the total amount given is coordinated between spouses. For my Canadian clients and the few American ones I have, contributions are never directly from a household even if it is a joint bank account - the money is attributed to one or more individuals or organizations.

2) Households are great in theory for keeping address and phone data clean for related people through the update process. This convenience tends to break down in the real world of certain demographics - eg younger cohabiting activists tending to sign petitions, and some households with two high professional incomes. And the question is how do you want to be wrong - sending stuff with both names to the new address after a breakup, or to one name at old and new addresses?

3) The process for importing households as well as individual contacts is more time consuming and thus costly. And if the proportion of address/phone changes that involve a change in household membership/definition is significant, the on-going convenience of updating both (or all) addresses with a single edit is reduced, as the effort of breaking up a household is significantly more than twice the effort of a single edit.

4) With the ability to track relationships separately from shared address, an address change for one person could result in triggering a workflow to call to confirm address change for others in domestic relationships with that person.

5) For many non-profit, advocacy, and membership organizations, the kinds of interactions and relationships that are important are more easily handled through using individuals rather than households as the base unit. This is particularly the case when postal mailing costs can be brought down by consolidating residents at a single address into a single postal mailing label, and development and fundraising targeting can be done using relationships / soft targetting (at least in theory). It doesn't work as well for others, eg ones with free family memberships for those cohabiting with a full member, though even here it can be implemented through relationships rather than creating Household contacts.

6) Committed, stable, financially interdependent (from a fundraising perspective) relationships occasionally involve more than one address usually due to jobs in different cities. About 1 in 2 marriages in Canada end in divorce, and I think the figure may be higher for common law relationships which are considered legal marriages after 12 months. Joint custody of kids is common, with kids alternating week by week between parents. Even when one parent is granted custody, it is common for the other spouse (usually the father in heterosexual couples) to get the kids every other weekend or more.

7) For organizations tracking contacts with whom they do not have strong aand deep relationships, e.g. petition-signers, occasional event-attendeees, people who are door-knocked on every couple of years, my sense is that it is safer to treat address and home phone information as varying by individual rather than by household. Checking on household status when updating an address or phone number is awkward and not always effectively included in the business rules of organizations. When the organization has relatively intense interactions and deeper knowledge of the relationships, eg religious community members, a housing coop with fairly accurate and up to date knowledge of who is living in and financially responsible for its units, then it might be safer to assume to assume that household records will be accurately terminated.

8) Somewhat unrelated, Canadian election authorities, possibly in cahoots with Canada Post, seem to be assigning addresses location codes. For certain targetting purposes, it is highly relevant what the address is irrespective of the current occupant. The new occupant of a home is more likely than average to share the same political, consumer, and charitable giving propensities of the former occupant. In a way, an address with a history behind it is a like a tiny census track. This is much more relevant to political organizations and campaigns that deal with almost all residential addresses than it is to organizations that are much more targetted.