Hey Trailblazers!
I have a theory question for you. My NGO org has many constituents that participate with us in different ways. Some are donors, some are community volunteers, some are college volunteers, some are corporate volunteers, some are program recipients, and some are more than one of these things.
Currently we have the account object for tracking all of these things with different records types (Community Chapter, College Chapter, Households, Company, etc.). We use a junction object called affiliations to relate a contact with one or more accounts (so a contact could be in a Community Chapter and a College Chapter with two affiliation records).
I have been noodling with the idea of breaking each of these record types into their own custom objects and then creating a direct master-detail relationship for each organization type. My question is: what are the pros and cons, in your experience, to each of these options? My first thought is that it would make the ERD look a lot cleaner and easier to understand. In my experience, a cleaner ERD usually results in a more stable database, but I am super curious to hear your thoughts on it.
Thanks in advance and let me know if you need more details!
I created a simple junction object in my organization for each type. We are a school and have students, teachers, facility renters, donors, etc.. We found that one person could be many types. The junction object is on the contact and is called, "MMA Student" (our Org is "MMA"), "MMA Renter" etc. When someone is donating, for example, we create an "MMA Donor" record that is just a child record under their contact with a master detail record. The contact is the master, the MMA Donor is the child. There are only two fields on these junction records. One is a lookup to the contact and the other is the name of the field. It has helped us in so many ways.
