CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm exploring using the Households function (my import data is not structured toward households) but finding Households extraordinarily difficult to work with. However, because it is important that household members with a different last name as aggregated in memberships and mailings, I am trying to make memberships apply to all household members to skirt some of the issues that come up with mailings. Surprisingly, I can't find any way to make this function work. Is there any way to set it up so that one member of a household becoming a member can trigger an equal membership for other members of that household?

Thanks

One approach which I know works is to create a "Household Membership" membership type which would be for Households and extend to all "Household Members". This works decently if your staff is adding the membership is the back-office, but not so well for self-service since "households" can't fill out online contribution forms.

Two other possibilities:
* Construct Head of Household <- Household Member relationships (1 : many) using a new relationship type which is Individual <-> Individual. Then the membership type is configured to be acquired by Head of Household and extended to Household Members. This should work, but has the constraint that one person is "special" in the household.

* Use organization instead of household to connect people to an entity. Then you can use the On Behalf feature to allow individuals to signup for / renew a membership "on behalf of" the organization (which in these cases is a household). You'd probably need to do some word replacements and / or template customizations to make this usable, but might be worth experimenting with.

I think some folks do something like this for couples w/ different last names (if they don't want to use households):
- Bob Smith, Individual, do not email + do not send postal mail
- Jane Doe, Individual, spouse of bob smith (relationship), Email Greeting (custom): Dear Jane and Bob, Postal Greeting (custom): Dear Jane and Bob, Addressee (custom): Jane Doe and Bob Smith

Exports for postal mailing, email messages, etc. then go to Jane but are addressed to both.