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What are Relationships?

Create a relationship between two records to indicate that they are connected. The most common type of relationship is between a parent and child. You can also create relationships between students and a variety of other influencers.

Relationships vs. Family Members

The person record can store data about family members in two separate ways. By default, parent/guardian information is stored as fields on the student record, NOT as a separate record. Relationships exist between two separate records, and can be defined as parent-child, guardian-dependant, and a number of influencer-student variations.

Family Members

When a Form or Application utilizes the Parent / Legal Guardian Field Grouping (user-family-root), this will create a Family Member. The primary record will list Family Members on the Family Members card or in the Family Members tab (under "More Data"). A Family Member is not separate record and can NOT be segmented.

Relationships

A Relationship exists between two separate records. Each record contains a reference to the other, either on the Relationships card or the Relationships tab (under "More Data").

Both records can be segmented directly, or via the Relationship. For example, you might create a Segment of admitted student's parents.

Relationship records can be created two different ways;

Importing a list of parent/guardian/influencer records
Creating a Rule to extract the data from the Family Members on the student’s profile (user-family-root) and create a separate Record.

Creating Relationship Records via a Rule

Make sure you're already familiar with Workflows and Rules before using this method.

Use this method to convert Family Member data into separate records that are related to the student record. Learn more about Family Members vs. Relationships.

Create a Segment of student records that need Family Member data extracted and transformed into relationships. Consider limiting this Segment to relevant records, like Prospects or Applicants, where communicating with parents is most useful. Also consider filtering your segment by student profile types.
Create a new Rule. Set the Rule to be "Scheduled". The schedule can be at whatever frequency you need. Once a week it usually fine.
Add an Action with an Action Type of "Create Profile". Define the Family Member Role, the Segment from which the Action should look for Family Members, and the Relationship the new record should have to the original. Save the Action.
Create more steps for other Family Member roles and Relationship types as needed.
Set the Rule to Active.

Record Creation Logic

Element451 will dynamically find any family information on the students records within the selected Segment. During this process, Element451 will check if the email address is already in use on an existing record. If so, it will not change the profile type of that record.

Required Attributes

Family Members must have the following attributes in order to be processed by the Rule action and created as a Relationship.

Type: Parent, guardian, etc.
First Name
Last Name
Email
Living: Must be set to "true"

The Family Member will be skipped if any attributes are missing.

Importing Relationship Records

Make sure you're familiar with importing before you tackle this section.

Prep your Import file. Your file will need to include the parent/guardian/influencer information AS WELL AS a reference to the Element451 student record they are related to. This reference can be their student's email, element ID or other identifier.
Create a new import task and uploaded your file.
Map as you for a student record (First Name, Last Name, Email, etc.).
Map your relationship reference field and click "Add User Relationship". This will allow you to define a relationship based on that reference.
Select the type of identity reference for the "Match by" field. Your options include Email Address (not recommended), Element ID, Social Security Number and many more.
Select the Relationship Type which could be parent-child, guardian-dependant, counselor-student.
Confirm the matched record relationship type. For example, is the matched record the parent or the child?
Under Groups & User Type, set the import records to Family or Influencer.
Run the Import Task