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Track relationships between donors

Record who is married to whom, who sits on which board, and which donor introduced which — so the next ask goes through the person who can actually make it.

Donors don't give in isolation. A couple gives as a household, a business owner gives alongside their company, a board member brings three friends with them. The Relationships tab on each donor records those ties, so when you plan an approach you can see who else is in the picture.

Before you start

Relationships are part of the Grow plan. On the Free plan the tab shows an upgrade prompt instead of the list.

You need ADMIN or EDITOR role to add, edit or remove a relationship. VIEWERs can read them.

Both people need to be donor records in Together already. If the other person isn't there yet, add them first.

Add a relationship

  1. Open a donor from Donors and choose the Relationships tab.
  2. Click Add relationship.
  3. Search for the other donor by name or email, and pick them from the results.
  4. Set the first role, labelled "Jane Doe is Cameron Stress's". That's the other person's role, and it's the label that shows next to their name in the list, so read the field as the sentence it makes: "Jane Doe is Cameron Stress's Parent".
  5. The second role, labelled "Cameron Stress is Jane Doe's", fills itself in from the one you picked: choose Parent and it sets Child. Change it if that isn't right.
  6. Add a description if there's something worth remembering: "met at the 2019 fundraiser", "co-signed the campaign launch letter".
  7. Click Add relationship.

Both fields name the two people as soon as you've picked the donor, so you can read back what you're about to record before you save it.

Add one straight from the duplicates queue

There's a second way in, for the case that produces most relationships: a flagged duplicate that turns out to be two related people.

Mark the pair Not Duplicate in the duplicates queue and the queue offers Add relationship for the pair you just cleared. Every card in the Not Duplicates tab carries the same button, so an earlier backlog is workable too. Either way the second donor is already filled in — you only choose the two roles.

The relationship appears on both donors, read from each side. If you record that Jane is Cameron's Parent, Jane's own page shows Cameron as her Child. The Relationships tab carries a count, so you can see at a glance whether a donor has any without opening the tab, and the relationship is added to both donors' Activity timelines.

A pair of donors can hold one relationship. If two people are both siblings and business partners, record the one that matters for fundraising and put the rest in the description.

Relationship types

Together starts every organisation with ten types: Parent, Child, Sibling, Spouse, Partner, Friend, Colleague, Employer, Employee and Relative.

They're deliberately non-gendered. If your organisation prefers "Mother" and "Son", create those as your own types.

To create one, type the label into either role field. When it doesn't match anything you already have, the list offers Create "…". Click it and Together asks for the reverse label — what the relationship is called from the other side:

Get the reverse right when you create the type: once created, a type can't be renamed, and Together uses the reverse to fill in the second field every later time someone picks it.

New types are available to everyone in your organisation straight away, on every donor.

Edit or remove

The pencil beside a relationship edits its description. The type itself can't be changed — remove the relationship and add it again if you picked the wrong one.

The bin removes the relationship. That's permanent and it removes it from both donors, including the entry on their Activity timelines. Removing a relationship doesn't touch either donor record or their giving history.

What happens when donors merge

If you merge two donor records, their relationships move to the surviving record. Two of them can't come along:

What to do next