Householding

Quick Answer: Householding

Group donors at one address—typically spouses—to recognize combined giving, dedupe campaign mail, and export household totals without merging separate donor records.

Householding

Householding links individual donor profiles into a shared household with roles, a primary contact, and automatically calculated household totals. It reduces duplicate mailings, surfaces major-donor recognition at the family level, and powers household columns in exports and the Household Giving report.

What You Can Do

• Create a household from a donor profile or link an existing donor into a household with head, spouse, child, or other roles
• Set the primary contact used when marketing deduplicates by household
• View household members, combined giving, and individual totals on the profile card
• Export household columns from Donor CRM or run the Household Giving report

Common Tasks

Link spouses after a joint gift

1. Open either donor profile in Donor CRM.
2. Click the household action and choose Link Existing or Create New.
3. Assign roles and mark the primary contact; household totals refresh automatically.

Send one email per household

1. When composing a Fundraising email campaign, enable household deduplication on the recipients step.
2. Alignmint sends to the primary contact when one is set, reducing duplicate messages to the same address.

Good to Know

Householding is not the same as Merge. Merge combines duplicate person records; households keep separate donor histories while sharing recognition and mail logic. Recurring gifts stay on individual donors.

Organization-type donors cannot join households. Year-end household statements remain a future enhancement; individual tax receipts still pull from donation rows only.

Householding is available on all plans with Donor CRM. Campaign dedupe and exports follow the same household rules on Free through Enterprise.

Related guides

• Donor CRM
• Email campaigns
• Household giving report