1. CLEAN UP HOUSEHOLD DATA & RELATIONSHIPS: (especially for young-adult alumni of youth programs)
Usually the people records for youth program participants are attached to household with parents (and even siblings). As young people mature, most of them will move out of their parents household and establish their own address. For households that include both parents and young adults, consider doing these two things:
(1) Map the parent/child relationships between people in the household.
(2) If you have new household address information for a young adult, move the alumnus out of the parents household . If the alumnus does not have a new mailing address, it may be better to leave them at the parent's address for the time being.

2. USE TAGS TO ORGANIZE PEOPLE for RESEARCH, NETWORKING or FUNDRAISING PURPOSES:
You can apply MARK or COHORT tags to groups of alumni in order to make it easier to find and work with them. ** Note ** it is NOT recommended to make a single ALUMNI tag for all of your alumni, as this will require constant maintanance or quickly become out-of-date as you run further programs. However, a tag for a historical cohort of alumni from a certain time period could be very useful.

3. UPDATE PERSONAL CONTACT INFORMATION:
"Contact information" consists of the following:

 NAME, EMAIL, CELL PHONE, HOUSEHOLD MAILING ADDRESS.

How can we tell if contact information is up-to-date? There is an additional field called:

LAST_CONTACT_UPDATE

Making any edits to contact information fields will automatically update this "LAST_CONTACT_UPDATE" field. If you have personally verified someone's contact information as correct, you can manually click the button to mark it as "up-to-date". This field can be used in a QUERY, or can be sorted on using the PEOPLE -> TOOLS -> CONTACT INFO UPDATE screen.

Some techniques for getting UP-TO-DATE contact information:

• Incidental connections - if you (or any staff member) happens to incidentally communicate with someone (if they happen to call or stop by the office), consider quickly updating their contact information.
• Website Publish the Linseed ALUMNI CONTACT FORM on your website - which will allow alumni to update their information at will..
• Email or SMS message the alumni contact form to your alumni. If you choose to send this directly from Linseed, you can personalize each message and include a smart link to the alumni form (which will save time for the person completing the form, and save you time in the processing of the form.)
• Work the telephone! If you plan to make telephone calls to a group of alumni, you can obviously use Linseed to work through lists of people. If you will rely on volunteers (or other alumni) to make these calls, you can give them LINSEED TAP ACCESS to help them lookup and record information while they make their calls.

4. LONG-TERM RESEARCH
Use SURVEYS to study groups past program participants. Create a survey using TYPEFORM, SURVEY MONKEY, or WUFOO forms. Create a matching SURVEY TAG in Linseed, and link this to your hosted survey so that results will automatically be sent to Linseed.