With connected profiles, you can treat everybody as an individual.
What are Connected Profiles?
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
The problem with a bloated bio
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 a single contact bio, it's hard to track your interactions with each person because they 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.
When you store all the relations of a person in a single bio, 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.
How to get started with connected profiles
Makerble connects your information so that you never need to enter the same thing twice. Here are our top tips on how to best get started.
Create a relationship type for every type of relationship that could exists between two contacts
Create a role for each kind of individual whose details you'll need to store - e.g. Client, Emergency Contact, Volunteer, Reference Provider, Referral Agency, etc.
Create a contact form for each role.
Organise your different types of contact into separate projects. There are several reasons to do this but two of them are:
It's easier to count your number of clients when your client-projects only contain profiles of your clients
When sending surveys, you can simply select all the contacts within a particular project rather than needing to filter the contacts within a project to only show those that are listed as clients rather than other roles.
Link several contacts forms together in a Signup Page. Whenever someone fills this in, it will
Create a separate bio (contact profile) for each person or organisation
Automatically connect those profiles together using relationships
In the Contacts App, use the relationship filter and role filter to quickly find particular types of individual