For the most part, emails should be simple. At worst, a person would have two email addresses, one personal and one work.
I've noticed that in the nonprofit world that's not always the case. People have school and military accounts, shared accounts with their significant others, and manage generic accounts for organizations and groups.
On the other side of the coin, we have a mix of purposes and sources for email addresses: basic contact information (pulled from Cirrus, or entered manually), website account email (used for account creation or username logins on websites), and survey/newsletter emails (since the contact may not have opted in to received communication when reaching out to us or creating a website account).
And of course, some email addresses are outdated but might re-emerge through some other data source. So it would be nice to track history of what emails have been abandoned or unsubscribed (rather than simply unsubscribing the whole contact. They may just want to stop receiving emails to their work email but want to keep receiving emails at their personal email).
I'm playing with the idea of creating a child object that would track a lot of this information in email addresses. It would include automation so that if the Contact.Email field is updated, then an Email Address History (new custom object) record would be created.
While this would make a lot of our email lists more refined, I also think that we would not use Campaigns as much. This might not be a big deal.
Has anyone worked with or developed any system like this? What are some pros and cons that I may not be thinking of?
@Nonprofit Success Pack@Salesforce.org System Administrators@Marketing CommunicationsThanks for looping me in, @Jeff Fenner. We used a "Detail Record" object that was child to Contact at an org where constituents wore multiple "hats" at the same time and different data needed to be recorded and visible for each those different roles (this Contact Record types didn't work well). We did not use if specifically for email addresses, we still used the NPSP functionality of multiple email addresses on the Contact and a Preferred Email selection to populate the "Email" field.
