Hey Thai-Son! Thanks for the feedback.

I agree with your enhancement suggestions here but I am hopeful that the feature in its current state at least exceeds the "practically useless" label for many organizations. We have accounted for the specific enhancements you mention here for upcoming NXT updates, however we felt in its current state, the feature provided enough value to warrant releasing it before the additional changes were made. That doesn't mean we won't be making the additional changes, it just means we wanted any users that do find it useful in its current state to go ahead and start using it while we continued to develop/enhance the functionality with additional features. This is becoming fairly standard practice with NXT (and the software development industry at large).

I do want to point out that for spouse relationship records specifically, your first suggested should be accounted for in the "Spouse name" column. The presence of a "Spouse name" and the "Not a constituent" label in the "Constituent ID" column are intended to make it clear that the record you are seeing is not a full constituent and exists because they are someone's spouse. That being said, I believe you can effectively accomplish what you are asking for on spouse records, but please do correct me if I'm wrong.

Our discovery efforts show one significant gap with this pattern as the product sits today, and that is with Organization contacts that are not full constituent records. We plan to add a column that similarly shows as a link to an Organization constituent record when/if the relationship record exists within the context of that organization constituent as a contact. We also may do the same for the inverse (Organizations that are returned because they exist as a relationship record within the context of an individual constituent record). Hopefully that will close the gap that you are referencing in your first suggestion above. But again, please let me know if it does not.

I think it's important to note that these are viewed as enhancements to the ability to search for a relationship records. While they are certainly helpful, they don't prevent someone from effectively discovering whether or not a record exists (constituent or not). While I believe we have already accounted for these with current roadmap items, it wouldn't hurt to log these as new ideas in the Idea Bank. It's often hard to declare something "done" unless its very specific and finite. So while I think your message of "searching for a relationship record is not a solved problem for my organization in NXT" may be true, in a literal sense it is and it will help us to better understand the specific gaps that you are referring to (which I think you have done with your numbered items here).

The other change you mention I would summarize as "Include a Relationships tile on relationship records". This is a very logical request and something that is currently on the roadmap as well. Making relationship records accessible was a nice first step, but we certainly realize we will need to add functionality to help round out the reasons why you would want to access their records (visiting related records, editing contact info, promoting to a full constituent record, etc).

Thanks again for your feedback and I certainly hope that you find future enhancements will make this functionality more useful for your and your organization!

Thanks,

Jarod

Jarod,

I just want to share a few early thoughts on this new feature
implementation. First of all, so glad to see this go from an idea to rolled
out! However, from my early impressions, this feature is missing some core
functionality that renders it practically useless to users.

1. On the search results screen after a user clicks on "Search
relationship records," there is no column that shows to which constituent
record this relationship belong, nor is there an option to configure the
columns displayed.
2. Once a user clicks on the relationship record, they are taken to that
relationship record's page, but there is no link or even text that displays
to which constituent record that relationship belongs.

The above two points really tackle the same issue – that searching for
relationship records is rendered useless unless you can (conveniently)
access the constituent record under which that relationship is nested. Note
that this is (and always has been) functional in spouse records.

Less importantly, users should also have the option to toggle such fields
to display as Relationship, Reciprocal, Title.

Hoping that the above will be addressed quickly. As it stands, searching
for relationship remains an unsolved pain point for my organization in RE
NXT.

Best,
Thai-Son

--
*Thai-Son Vu*
Development Associate
Success Academy Charter Schools

C: 646 512 9325

95 Pine Street, Floor 6
New York, NY 10005
successacademies.org
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I'm happy to announce that this feature has been implemented and shipped today to our production environment. Looks for more information in help and in the "What's New" section in help next Tuesday!

Hey everyone! Great idea and comments/feedback here. We are actively working on this capability now. I'm searching for a couple of brave volunteers to take a look at what we have done and help settle a few open questions around it. If you are interested, please send me an email at jarod.bonino@blackbaud.com and we'll get a quick discovery call set up! Shouldn't take longer than 15 mins or so. Thanks!

This continues to be a big pain point for our organization's use of RE NXT.

I'd like to bump this idea up. Think it's so crucial to be able to do something like search for a foundation staff member that shouldn't have their own constituent record and be directed to the foundation's record.

we should be able to search for contacts and alias and nick names..etc.  My Director wants me to load new records for all contacts because they won't display in the NXT search.  NO can't do that. This should be corrected.

I agree that we should absolutely be able to search for contacts using the search bar. Not having this functionality is a big hindrance for our organization.

I would vastly prefer a search window like RE:7, with customizable options from what fields you see in the results to whether contacts/non-constituent relationships are searched.