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Every contact can have several relationships which connect them to other contacts
For example:
Mother & Son
Referrer & Patient
Applicant & Reference Provider
Client & Emergency Contact Person
Employer & Employee
This gives you the freedom to
Quickly send a message to all the parents of your clients - because you can filter to find contacts who are a ‘parent’ in a relationship
Collect references by sending a survey to Reference Providers
Know that a particular person is the Emergency Contact Person for several of your clients and therefore avoid needing to store their information multiple times
Create a report to show how many clients have been referred by a particular referral partner - because they're connected using relationships rather than typing the referral partner’s contact detaips as a field on your client’s bio
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In your old system - whether that was paper forms, online forms or an old CRM - you might have collected all the details of a person’s relations on a single form and stored that in one place.
On the surface this looks simple because all the information relating to a person is in one bio. But it creates several problems that limit what you can do when it comes to communication, record keeping, data analysis and reporting.
When you store all the relations of a person on in a single contact bio, itbio, it's like putting all of your possessions in a single drawer. The upside is that you know that everything is in that drawer, but the downside is that you have to rummage through that drawer each time you want to get anything out of it.
It's hard to track your interactions with each person because each person doesn't exist as an individual person; they only exist as part of another person rather than existing as an individual. For example:
You could ask a Reference Provider for a reference but
your communication with the Reference Provider would appear in the Conversations App under the name of your client, not under their name as the reference provider.
Each time you wanted to send a survey to the client, you would have to check that you were sending it to the email address of the client, rather than to the email address of their parent, or their referee, or their referrer, or their employer, etc.
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How to get started with connected profiles
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