Understanding Household and Organization Relationships
DonorDock allows you to connect Individual contacts to Household and Organization records. These relationships help you understand how contacts are connected while still allowing you to track each person's gifts, activities, communication, and other information separately.
For example, you may use relationships to connect:
Spouses who each interact with your organization independently
Parents, children, and other family members
Students and their parents or guardians
Employees to their employer
Household and Organization records are their own contact records in DonorDock. They may be used simply to connect related Individuals, or gifts and activities may also be recorded directly on the Household or Organization when appropriate.
Household Relationships
A Household can group multiple Individual contacts who are part of the same family or household.
When Should I Use a Household?
We recommend using a Household when multiple people are related but interact with your organization independently.
Examples include:
Spouses who make separate donations
Spouses who volunteer or attend events independently
Parents and children who each participate with your organization
Students and their parents or guardians
Each person maintains their own Individual contact record while being connected through the same Household.
If the couple generally interacts with your organization together, such as making joint donations or attending events together, you may use a single Individual contact record and enter the spouse's information in the available spouse fields.
Rolling Up Household Member Giving
As of 8/30/2026, Administrators can choose whether Household giving statistics should include giving recorded on the Individual members of the Household.
When Roll Up Household Member Giving is enabled, the Household's giving statistics are calculated using:
Gifts recorded directly on the Household
Gifts and other applicable giving information recorded on Household members
This allows the Household to function as a family-level giving record while each member maintains their own Individual history.
The setting affects existing giving statistics such as Lifetime Gift amount, Last Gift, Largest Gift, year-to-date giving, pledge totals, and other giving-related fields. It does not create a separate set of Household reporting fields.
To enable this feature, an Admin can:
Open the settings menu (grid icon top right)
Select Setting
On the navigation pane on the left, select Features
Scroll down to the toggle for Roll Up Household Member Giving
Click Save
When the setting is changed, DonorDock recalculates Household records. For organizations with a large database, updated totals may take a few minutes to appear.
Individual and Organization contact totals are not changed by this setting.
If your organization prefers to continue managing couples using a single Individual record with spouse fields, you may leave Household giving roll-up turned off.
Communication Considerations for Couples
When using a single Individual contact with spouse information, email communications may be sent using both the primary email address and spouse email address stored on the Individual contact.
Text messages are sent only to the primary mobile phone number on the contact.
If you need to communicate with each person separately, particularly by text message, create an Individual contact record for each person.
How you structure your records should reflect how the family interacts with your organization and how you want to track those interactions.
Tracking Other Family Members
Household relationships can also be useful for family members who may not contribute financially.
For example, a child may volunteer or participate in programs while their parents make donations.
You can create the child as an Individual contact, assign an appropriate badge such as Volunteer or Participant, and connect them to the family's Household.
This allows you to maintain the child's participation history while still seeing their connection to the rest of the family.
What Information Belongs on a Household?
A Household is intended to represent the family or household as a whole rather than an individual person.
For this reason, person-specific fields such as first name, last name, job title, personal email addresses, phone numbers, date of birth, social media accounts, and similar fields are not displayed when they are empty on a Household record.
Household-level information such as the Household name, mailing address, salutation, and Do Not Solicit preference remains available.
If a Household already contains information in a field that is no longer intended for Household records, DonorDock does not delete the information. The existing value remains visible as read-only information so that it can be reviewed and moved to the appropriate Individual contact if needed.
Employer and Organization Relationships
Individual contacts may also be connected to an Organization record to identify their employer or another organizational relationship.
For example, you may create:
An Organization record for a local business
Individual contact records for employees of that business
Employer relationships connecting those Individuals to the Organization
This allows you to navigate between the Organization and the people associated with it while maintaining separate contact records for each Individual.
As with Households, an Organization is its own contact record. You can record gifts and activities directly on the Organization or on the Individual contacts associated with it, depending on how the interaction occurred.
Choosing the Right Record Structure
A simple way to decide how to organize your contacts is to consider who is interacting with your organization.
If two people generally interact as one unit, a single Individual record with spouse information may be sufficient.
If family members interact separately, create Individual records and connect them through a Household.
If you also want to report on the family's combined giving, consider enabling Roll Up Household Member Giving.
If an Individual is associated with a business, nonprofit, school, or other organization, create or use an Organization record and connect the Individual through their employer relationship.
The goal is to preserve each contact's individual history while also making it easy to understand and report on the relationships between the people and organizations in your database.