It is very crucial to understand the concept of Contacts in Fluxx in different scenarios and their linkages as well as how they behave in different situations.

Contact vs Account in Blackbaud vs. Fluxx

In WPP's old Grants Management System, Blackbaud, an account was a secure place online where applications and requirements get submitted; there was no direct association between account and any contact. An account was basically identified an email address and that was the only information visible on Blackbaud regarding an "account". A contact on the other hand, was  a record type that was linked to other record types. It represented a real person. This contact could be linked in different ways to other record types.

In Fluxx, on the other hand, there is a 1:1 correspondence between a User record and an "Account." Any user that has an email address, a User Profile, a User Role, and a Program will be able to sign into their Fluxx account and submit requirements, reviews, etc.

Contact vs Affiliation in Blackbaud vs. Fluxx

In Blackbaud, a contact contained the information related to an individual from a business point of view. For the most part, it was not concerned about the linkages. An affiliation was just a link that created a relationship between the contact record and other record types as needed (e.g. to requests or organizations). It was not concerned with personal information of the contact. It just knew that this contact record is related to that entity.

In Fluxx, the concept of an affiliation is completely scrapped. Instead, all Users are more or less "Contacts" within the system (hold information related to the individual from a business point of view, i.e. contains their business email address and business phone number). In Fluxx, instead of affiliations, user records are directly "linked" out from the critical records that they need to be connected to (i.e. Organizations and Grant Requests). Please see the Data Structure Simplified page for information on exactly how these linkages work.

Primary Contact

Within Blackbaud, the Primary contact, from the data structure's stand point, was special type of contact and as an exception to all the other types, at its core, it was linked directly to its primary purpose. For example, in the case of the primary contact of an organization, the contact record itself was directly linked to the organization.

Within Fluxx, this works somewhat analogously. The Primary Contact on a Grant Request is called the Grantee Org Owner; this user is directly linked out from the Grant Request, and is often also linked out from the Program Organization (i.e. the Organization that is requesting the Grant Request) as that Organization's Primary Contact (though the Org Primary Contact and the Grantee Org Owner do NOT necessarily need to be the same people; they can be different users).

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.