Question

Photo of Trey Hendon III

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Business Attributes

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I'd like to use Business relationships because it seems to be the intended way to associate people to organizations.  Two questions are coming to mind as I explore this:

  1. What kind of entity in Rock is a Business?
  2. Has anyone found a way to associate an attribute group to a Business?

I could make a Group Type that has the needed attributes for each Group, but I'd like to follow the intent of Businesses.

  • Photo of Jon Edmiston

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    Businesses are stored as a specific type of individual in the Person table. This may seem a bit strange, but it works quite well for tracking and reporting on giving (the primary reason they were included). While you could technically use person attributes with businesses, none of the attribute blocks support businesses.

    We had a similar need when creating the Spark/Rock website. We wanted to track the organizations that have downloaded and use Rock. For this we created a new group type instead of using businesses.

    Hope this helps.

    • Trey Hendon III

      Trey Hendon III

      Makes perfect sense. After posting, I logged into the SQL server and found the Business in the Person table. I was thinking that group type might be my most flexible option, but wasn't sure. Thanks!

      • Ken Roach

        Ken Roach

        Jon - do you mean that you added a Group Type 'Business', then added a top Group, 'Business', and added group fields as the business Group Attributes to keep the additional details for the business, then added each church as a new business groups, and added one person (me) into the group? So you've ended up with a long list of groups with only one person in them?

      • Photo of Marcie Rempel

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        I know this thread is a few years old now, but we're setting up organizations (churches and otherwise) as partners and I see how the Group Type/Group Attributes will work for this. I'm wondering how you handle a general contact for the Church. The church is the group name, but the individual (person) is 'General Contact'? I'm also wondering if you also create each church/organization as a Business and connect each person as contact as well. I want to eventually have certain contacts within an organization (with certain roles and certain group attributes) access resources via a secure login.  When I login to the Rock RMS site, it shows that I'm connected to our church as an Organization, is that all done through Businesses in Rock or through the Groups?

      • Photo of Jon Edmiston

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        I would pattern them after groups Marcie. Then create roles within the group for things like "General Contact".

        • Marcie Rempel

          Marcie Rempel

          Ok thanks. Eventually some of these partnerships may need to make contributions for resources (similar to the way we make donations to Rock RMs), in order for the individual to make a contribution on behalf of the organization, I'd need to set up a Business with Contacts as well right? I'm just thinking how the Rock RMS donation page is set up, how are you connecting me to my organization?

          • Ken Roach

            Ken Roach

            Hi Marcie. How did you end up configuring this? We are looking to do the same thing, so I'm wondering if you have any 'lessons learned'?

          • Photo of Marcie Rempel

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            Hi Ken - sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you. We've set up our 'partners' in groups with it's own group type, adding attributes like, Address, Partnership Type, Contract Start, Contract End. We then added members to the group with specific roles to that group type. We haven't starting using it fully yet so I haven't fully tested our set up. I was able to create dataviews and reports that I wanted though and communicate with certain groups and certain roles within those groups. Hope that helps.

          • Photo of Tony Visconti

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            Just a quick note for those looking to add attributes to groups. I did not find a way to do this even when trying to make use of the Entity Attribute Values. What I did find is that you can tag business and then report on this info using data views. This was helpful for us as we tried to come up with way to exclude businesses that represent Donor Advised Funds from our list of contributions statements we want to print.