It is very crucial to understand the concept of Contacts in Blackbaud in different scenarios and their linkings as well as how they behave in different situations.
This is a live document and will give as much insight into Blackbaud Contacts as possible.
Contact vs Account
An account is a secure place online where applications and requirements get submitted. There is no association between account and any contact. An account is basically identified an email address and that is the only information visible on Blackbaud regarding an account
A contact on the other hand, is a record type that is linked to other record types. It is representing an real person. This contact can be linked in different ways to other record types.
Contact vs Affiliation
A contact contains the information related to an individual from a business point of view. For the most part, it is not concerned about the linkings.
An affiliation is just a link that creates a relationship between the contact record and other record types as needed for example to requests or organizations. It is not concerned with personal information of the contact. It just knows that this contact record is related to that entity.
Primary Contact
From data structure's stand point, Primary contact is special type of contact ans as an exception to all the other types, at its core, it is linked directly to its primary purpose. For example, in the case of the primary contact of an organization, the contact record itself is directly linked to the organization.
Affiliations
Primary Contact
There is still also an affiliation created for it. So, in other words, this contact is linked to the organization in two different ways.
Staff
This is referring to internal staff. It has nothing to do with applicants. This is specially important when it comes to correspondence where staff literally means internal staff (so ... us and not them!).
Primary Investigator
This is not added by default. In forms designer, we have to add this contact type and then drag the proper fields into the application in order for this affiliation to exist.
Notes on Contacts and/or Affiliations
Always close an affiliation when someone is retired or when the request is declined or when we have no relationship with the grant any longer.
NEVER delete an affiliation, unless added by mistake. Always close.
When changing the Primary Contact, check both places, on the record type and under the affiliations list to make sure that the change is applied properly.
To modify the organization of the linked affiliation, the affiliation has to be deleted and re-created.
The best way of creating the affiliation or any record type in general, is to open the lowest related record and then create the affiliation that way. This practice will take care of most linkings automatically.
If an Organization is created automatically and has the same email as the primary contact or just any contact, please delete the email from the ORGANIZATION record. This will save a hassle when we are assigning reviewers. There cannot be a reviewer portal for an email address that appears in the system in more than one place.
Staff in reminders means internal staff as wpp internal staff and has nothing to do with the applicant.
One more thing is that we can always retrieve the affiliations related to certain requests and select them all and then send a correspondence to all of them at once.