The profile relationships function can be used to link individual profiles, such as employees of a company, to an organisation profile.
This is particularly useful you wish to maintain a profile on an individual as they move to different companies in your industry.
This example will show you how to link individual employees to a single employer using the profile relationships. To illustrate this we will use the following profile names:
ABC Company - organisation type profile
XYZ Company - organisation type profile
Joe Bloggs - individual type profile
Jane Doe - individual type profile
Relationship setup
The first step is to make sure you have your profile relationship setup, you can find instructions on how to do this in the User Guide.
In our example we have named our relationship Organisation, and this relationship name will display on each profile.
The next step is the parent and child labels. Every relationship will have these, so you need to make sure they are relevant and make sense for your association.
In this example, because we want to link employers and employees so we’ve used those titles to name the parent and child.
Parent - Employer
Child - Employee
When setting up your relationship, consider if you want the employee (the child profile) to view or edit the employer’s (the parent) profile and if they should inherit the membership status of the employer (parent profile). If yes, the select the appropriate settings in the relationship type setup.
Linking profiles with relationships
Now that you have created the relationship, you can start linking the profiles.
To do this, we are going to open the profile for ABC Company, and go to the Relationships tab.
On the tab, we can see that there are currently no linked profiles.
To link the ABC Company profile to Joe Bloggs, we first need to select which profile relationship we want to use from the Relationship Type dropdown. In this case, we want to link the profiles using the Organisation relationship.
When the dropdown menu displays, we can see their are two options for the Organisation relation. One for the parent/Employer and one for the child/Employee.
ABC Company is the parent in this example, so we want to select the Organisation: link to Employee option.
Underneath the Relationship Type selection, you can see a search box to link to your chosen profile, the name of the search box will change depending on which option you have selected. In this, example it has changed to Link to Employee.
We want to link Joe Bloggs' profile, so we need to click in this box and enter the search term. Select the appropriate profile from the dropdown that appears and then click the Save Relationship button.
Once you’ve saved the relationship, it will be listed under the relationship’s title above. You can click on the down arrow icon to expand the list.
Now we will repeat the same steps to also add Jane Doe as an employee of the ABC Company.
Viewing a profile’s relationships
The relationship links are shown on both the parent and child profiles. For example, if we go to Jane Doe’s profile, we can see that she is linked to the ABC Company and the relationship page shows the parent label of Employer and the ABC Company is linked there.
Deleting a relationship
A relationship link can be removed at any time by clicking the red delete button for the relationship link.
Updating profile relationships
An example of where you might want to delete a relationship link is when the individual moves from one company to another. You can delete the relationship link while still retaining the individual profile and its history.
For example, if Jane Doe were to move from ABC Company, we can delete the relationship link to ABC Company as her employer.
If Jane Doe then moves to XYZ Company we can update the relationships to reflect this. By doing this, we’ve been able to maintain the full profile history and just update the relationship links.
