Contact & Relationship Management

The Law Center’s relationships are the cornerstone of our thriving organization. Keeping track of those relationships, though, is difficult. That’s why we’ve attempted to create a relatively simple system for managing individual and organizational contacts. And that’s why it's important for you to add individuals and organizations into our database that express an interest in our work -- to coordinate and grow our community of supporters, collaborators, and donors! This system should allow everyone at the Law Center access to interact with the same, relevant information about our organizational relationships. We use NationBuilder (NB) to keep track of these relationships. Our hope is that this guide is useful for you and others at the Law Center in furthering our mission and moving our vision of the world into existence.

When individuals or organizations are imported into our NB database, a profile is either created or updated. An individual or org can be imported into our NB database if they like a post on Facebook, retweet one of our tweets, or RSVP to an event on our website. So, when we talk about importing people or organizations, what we’re really talking about is organizing a database of profiles. That means, individuals and organizations might have multiple, duplicative profiles in our database. Don’t worry! It is the accountability of the Contact Management Coordinator to steward this resource. They will be able to support you and answer any questions you have about our NB people database, such as helping you “dedupe” (a.k.a. merge) multiple incomplete profiles into one, more complete profile. The more complete the profile, the more holistic a picture we can see of the person or organization we are trying to build a relationship with. IMPORTANT: Whenever you are collecting contact information, make sure you have an email address or phone number for each individual or organization you want to import. Without either of those, any new profiles that are created and the respective information we import is relatively useless.

The guide below exists to acquaint you with how we’ve designed our database, how to navigate it, and how you can help build our institutional memory of the relationships we have as an organization.