Using the Relationships App
Contacts don't exist in isolation. People have spouses, employers, households, boards, and referral chains — and knowing that two records are related is often the most valuable thing in the database.
Relationships lets you link contacts to each other with a typed connection, right from the contact record.
Installing
Add Relationships from the Apps marketplace. It adds a panel to contact detail views rather than a sidebar item.
Linking two contacts
- Open a contact.
- Find the Relationships panel.
- Link a contact — search for the other person and choose the relationship type.
The link is visible from both sides, so you never have to remember which record you created it on.
Relationship types
The app ships with useful defaults — spouse, employer, household — and you can manage the list yourself, adding the types that matter for your work. A membership organization might add "referred by"; a campaign might add "precinct captain for".
Define the types deliberately and early. A tidy short list gets used; twenty overlapping types get ignored.
Why it's worth the effort
Relationships turn a contact list into something that reflects how people actually relate. Knowing that a modest donor is married to a major one, or that three contacts share a household and shouldn't get three copies of the same mailing, is exactly the kind of context that's obvious to the person who knows it and invisible to everyone else until it's recorded.