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Connect People to Organizations (Affiliations)

Goal: Record who belongs to an organization — employees, board members, a primary contact — so you can move between a person and their employer and credit the right relationships.

What an affiliation is​

An affiliation links a person to an organization with a relationship type (employee, board member, executive, contact, and so on). One person can be affiliated with more than one organization, and an organization can have many affiliated people.

Add an affiliation​

  1. Open the organization and go to the People tab.
  2. Search for the person by name or email and select them.
  3. Choose the relationship type and, if appropriate, mark them as the primary contact.
  4. Save. The person now appears under the organization, and the organization appears on that person's record.
note

Only one person can be the primary contact for an organization at a time — setting a new primary contact clears the previous one.

Turn a person's employer into an organization​

People brought in from another system often have their employer recorded only as a name. On the person's Overview tab, the Organizations card lists that name with Employer · not linked to an organization record.

  1. Select Create organization next to the employer name.
  2. The name is filled in from the person's record. Change it if the organization's legal name is different; the employer name on the person stays as it was entered.
  3. To add more now, open Add more details (optional) and fill in any of the type, EIN, website, contact email or phone, and primary address. You can also add these later on the organization's page.
  4. Select Create and link. The organization is created and the person is added to it as an employee. If they have no other primary employer, this one is marked primary.

If an organization that looks like the same one already exists (same EIN, or the same name), you're asked before anything is created. Choose Link to that organization to use the existing record, or Create new anyway if they really are different organizations.

Creating the organization needs permission to create organizations; linking to an existing one needs permission to update them.

Automatic affiliations from giving​

When a signed-in donor gives on behalf of an organization (see Attribute gifts to organizations), Omnivo automatically records them as a contact for that organization — but only if they don't already have an affiliation with it, so an existing role (such as board member) is never overwritten.

Automatic affiliations from corporate volunteering​

Corporate volunteer groups link people to the group's organization the same way:

  • Anyone who registers through a corporate group (by email invite or public link, with or without an existing account) is recorded as a volunteer of that organization.
  • The group's contact/organizer is recorded as a volunteer coordinator of the organization.

As with giving, this only adds an affiliation when the person doesn't already have one with that organization, so an existing relationship is never replaced. These volunteers then appear on the organization's People tab, and the organization shows on each volunteer's record.

Remove an affiliation​

On the People tab, use the remove button next to an affiliation. This only unlinks the person from the organization; neither the person nor the organization record is deleted.