By: Christian Ragland

June 2nd, 2025

Introduction

In the April 2025 Release, a new feature was introduced to Compyle: households and household linking.

This feature creates an entirely new entity type which can be used to link individuals (often family members) together as a collective “household” unit and track services that benefit all members of the household.

In this article, we’ll go over the benefits of this grouping option, the key functionality, how to set it up in your instance, recommendations for best practices, and useful links for further education in the help center.

1. How can household linking improve my work?

Many nonprofit and government organizations serve families/households rather than individuals alone. Compyle now allows you to capture household relationships and track services to the household as well as to individual family members. 


Household Linking Benefit: Easier Tracking & Reporting on Households Served

If your organization provides household or family services, then this new feature will extend your ability to easily capture each household, its family members, and the services provided to them collectively as a household and singly as individuals. This will also help with funder and grant reporting requirements that require household metrics.

Household Linking Benefit: Increased Understanding with Added Family Context 

Even if your organization is not required to report on the families or households served, having a way to gather and view the household relationships of service recipients could improve client outcomes by providing more context about the individual household members and their situation. That in turn allows for more targeted interventions and engagement. 

Household Linking Benefit: Capture Information at New Levels for Greater Nuance

With the addition of households, information can be collected in Compyle at any or all of the following levels:

Participant: An individual service recipient (a human) with demographic information. This individual may be:

  • Assigned to participant groups along with other individual clients
  • Linked to a household
  • Designated as the primary contact for an organization

If the individual participant is in a group, household, or associated with an organization, that information will be visible within the participant folder.

Household: One or more individuals who live together and share resources. A household will be linked to at least one participant, who will be considered the head of household and primary contact for that household. Additional participants can be connected, and you can track each person’s role within the household. The household as a whole may be assigned to multiple household groups along with other households. However, each participant may only be an active member of one household at a time.

Organization: A community partner, agency, department, program, company, or other collaborative group of individuals working together for a common purpose. An organization may be connected to a single participant as the primary contact. Organizations can be assigned to organization groups along with other organizations. 

Each entity–Participant, Household, or Organization–can respond to surveys, provide attached files, and engage in activities tracked in notes. They can be searched, sorted into groups, and added through public application forms.  

Household Linking Benefit: Save Data Entry Time with “Autofill Contact Info from Head of Household” Option

This feature allows you to save data entry time by 

  • 🏠Household form: Choosing to copy the phone and address of the head of household to the household record.
  • 🧍Participant form:  When you create new participants through the “Add Members” feature, the household contact information will auto fill on the new participant record.


This will be most useful if your organization directly serves households, families, or other shared residence groups.

 

This is the power of household linking: easily track and report on families/households, have a greater understanding of individuals in the context of their household situation, capture information at new levels for greater detail, and save data entry time with autofill for household contact details.  

2. How can I begin using this feature in my instance?

As of April 2025, the household feature will not be available by default. Interested organizations will have to turn it on within Compyle settings to begin linking participants this way. Luckily, it can be easily accessed by an instance administrator from within Compyle’s Instance Settings (pictured). 

If you haven’t already, this is also a good time to consider whether or not your organization wants to do data intake for organizations or anonymous participants as well. 

Further household setting to consider

For best results, we recommend customizing the household form. A new “Household Field” option should appear under Admin after turning on Households. From there, you can view standard and custom fields to include. For example, the built-in options for household type (which can be set as a required field) are based on the American Consumer Survey by the U.S. Census bureau. Options such as “Family: Married Couple” and “Nonfamily Household” come as options. However, you can also create custom household types from this same “Household Field” page.

3. What are your recommendations for best results?

As is true for implementing any new data collection process, we recommend that you:

  • 💬Talk to internal stakeholders (staff/volunteers) about what they need to know for
    • day-to-day service/support
    • performance management/reporting
    • program planning/resource management
  • 📋Apply that information to set up
    • Household form: standard field options and custom fields
    • Supporting forms: Survey forms & Note Type forms for household tracking
    • Public form: customized Household profile(s) to use with surveys/notes
    • Household groups for managing households
  • 📖Show the new forms to internal stakeholders and get their feedback
    • Ask why – how the changes will benefit them
    • Ask when – get the context for when different info is relevant
  • 🧾Listen to their feedback and edit the forms:
    • Maintaining the balance between reporting needs and ease of data entry
    • Avoiding duplicate data entry
  • 💻Train your users on the new forms and data collection process.
    • Schedule a follow up session for user feedback/questions 1-2 weeks later
    • Refine the forms further as needed
  • 📊Develop compylations and Scorecard feeds using the new forms
    • Schedule the feeds to transfer data periodically

Here are three tips to ease your mind and improve your use of Compyle and households:

  • New entity = new forms

For ease of reporting, it is better to make new household copies of existing forms rather than adding households to existing forms. Having a mix of household, individual, and/or organization data all connected to the same form can make it difficult to figure out which records apply to which kind of service recipient.

  • Clearly label forms, fields, and data collections based on entity type

Simply naming your household tracking forms with “Household…” at the beginning will help reduce confusion for staff. Creating a “Household…” data collection will help your users easily find household surveys. If you have several different programs for households/families, you may find it helpful to create data collections for each program’s forms. Adding instructions in descriptions fields and in the labels for data fields can help staff know whether to use an individual’s information or details for the household as a whole.

Example: Label forms clearly—for example, “Household Intake Survey” vs. “Participant Wellness Check-In.”

  • Ensure “head of household” is carefully managed

The first member of a household will be automatically assigned as the “head of household.” This can be changed to a different participant in the household as needed. Keep in mind that each family member’s role is based on their relationship to the head of household so changing the head of household may require more adjustments to the roles. If you choose to enable household address autofill, the head of household’s information will be used to populate the household record at that point in time. Additionally, the  This is important information because default information such as address, zip code, or demographic information can be set to auto fill for the rest of the members of the household, following the head of household. So, if carefully managed, you need only to ask for this information once. Lets use an example:

John Example lives at 1234 Example Road, Denver, CO 1234. He fills out an intake form and is added as a participant in your Compyle instance. A staff person creates a household form and links John to it, making him the head of household. The staff person sets the household to autofill the contact information, and it comes from John’s participant record. During his intake interview, John mentions his partner and their three children. The staff person uses the “Add Family Member > New Participant” option in the household folder to create participant records for each of the other family members, and the address and phone information automatically fills in from the household record. This auto population streamlines the contact info data entry, saving your users time and reducing duplicate information gathering from each family member! 

4. Helpful links for further education

Households: Creating, Editing, and Updating Participant-Household Relationships (outline is published but work is ongoing)

woman using scorecard

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