The Households module comes with Select and Professional versions of FundRaiser Software and it allows you to group families or organizations together so you can see overall giving for an entire group. Although the module is called Households, it isn’t limited to families. It also works well for organizations, for example to see the giving patterns of a group of people related to a single organization.
So why would you want to create Households?
A primary reason would be to track the giving totals of a family or group of people from an organization. Perhaps your donor database contains a married couple and their two children. Each of these people gives personal donations, but then there are also family donations. By creating a household, you can track individual giving and place the family donations on the household record, which would then so a gift from “The Household.”
Households go beyond donations and giving. For example, by mailing only to the primary household record, you could save postage when multiple donors or contacts to your organization live at the same address. One newsletter could be shared among all the members of the household saving printing costs.
Households integrate with the relationships aspect of FundRaiser Professional, so you can see at a glance the relationships of everyone in a household. How does this help? Because you will be able to see the relationships of people to a major donor or perhaps board members or benefactors to your organization.
The Households function is a versitile way to group together people--either families or organizations--to see a giving history. I encourage you to take our Households training class to see if it would be beneficial to your organization.