CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello, we're working with WebAccess to launch CiviSchool soon.  I remember discussing several times whether or not to use households with CiviSchool.  Since we'll be implementing CiviCRM at the same time we don't have to worry about a legacy structure.  So now is the moment to decide on whether or not to use households.  I'm wondering what others have done or are considering.  Thanks!

Hi Cynthia, thanks for that document.  I'm sure that will help many who are considering using households-- I've overheard many complicated arguments for both.  I'm wondering specifically about using households with the CiviSchool module and if there are requirements or recommendations for one or the other.  Schools tend to be complicated because two parents from the same family may live in different households so my initial thought is that using households would complicate our information.  However, does CiviSchool require that information be organized in a specific way?

Hi - I can't comment on the civischool - but here is how we view households (and note some of this may have had workarounds invented that others could share about)

if you are wanting to mail to people at a shared household and can cope with the names just being joined on the label, then you don't need household (note recent bug with the joining names has been fixed i believe)

if you do use households and expose a contact's address in forms, eg fill out a membership, donation etc and update your address, then the address of the individual gets updated - not the household address, so your addresses get out of synch

in my view the route around this would involve a checkbox on forms that is exposed for people 'using household address' that would ask them to confirm if they are updating their 'own' address (ie they are leaving the household), or if they are updating the household address, in which case the change of address would apply to all people using the household address

of course the same problem occurs if you don't use households, ie John and Mary are at same address, you use 'combine names on label if at same address' - and then one of them fills out a form and updates their address and next thing the db has them at separate addresses

in which case, being able to tag people as 'living at same address as someone else' and then if either of them has an address change have them flagged as 'was a shared address but no longer' so that they can be manually checked and the co-habitant chased up

Using a co-habitant relationship is the way we have approached this at a very basic level - we can therefore run an occassional check to see if people who were co-habitants are not sharing an address, and follow up with them

being able to keep a 'history' of addresses is helpful in that regard to see which one moved when. we do have such a bit of code on one of our sites which we need to contribute back sometime

think that is about it - maybe worth running a couple of scenarios of the above on your system and see what occurs and whether you can live with it.

hope that helps rather than confuddling you further

We also send few "snail mail" mailings.  However, I suspect that we will use a lot of contribution forms and event forms.  I would want parents to be able to update their household address when contributing.  Is this possible? Thanks for all the advice!

lobo, that's a great point! I'd be happy to leave off addresses from contributions and events for our current parents.  However, we  have a contributors that aren't current parents and we'll need to collect their mailing addresses to send thank you notes.  I don't think there's an effective way to make some contribution pages show mailing addresses (pulic/non authenticated users) and some that do not because current parents might use a "public" contribution form that would include the address field.  Does that make sense?