Welcome to the Rock field guide for managing people. Individuals and families are at the core of what we do. In this guide we'll look at the people-managing tools you'll find in Rock. We'll also dig a little deeper to give you a glimpse into how Rock stores information about individuals to help you best use Rock in your organization.

Every person in the database belongs to a specific group type called Family. It’s impossible to add a person to the system without either creating a new family or adding them to an existing family. However, an individual isn’t limited to membership in a single family. They can belong to many families, but they will always have at least one. Below we look at some of the other unique things about the family.

Portrait of a Person

What Makes a Person

Before we start diving into the features, let's look at what makes up a person in Rock.

There are two main sources of data when looking at a person's record. First are the common data elements that are "hard-coded" into the system. These include basic fields like First Name, Last Name, Email, etc. These fields are common to all organizations, so they have been provided from the beginning of Rock and can't be removed.

Second, since every organization is different, Rock also allows you to add new data items to a person. We call these Person Attributes. You can add as many as you like, selecting a data type for each one. Common data types include:

• Text
• Date
• Number
• Dropdown of provided values (think of an attribute of T-Shirt Size with the values of S, M, L, XL)
• Boolean (aka, True/False, Yes/No)
• Document

While there are quite a few other data types you can use, those are the common ones.

Over time, your list of added attributes can become quite large. To help with this, we've provided the ability to group them into categories. You'll see these attribute categories later when we look at the Person Profile page.

Addresses

Addresses are tied to the family, not the individual. There are several different types of addresses defined in Rock, and you can add more if you’d like. The ones that are available out-of-the-box include:

• Home
• Work
• Previous

Adding an Address Type

If you'd like to add a new address type, follow these steps:

1. Add a new group location type under: Admin Tools > Settings > General > Defined Types > Group | Location Type. Be sure you select the Group | Location Type as there's also a Location | Location Type.
2. Add your new group location type to the Family group type under: Admin Tools > Settings > General > Group Types. From this screen select the Family group type and add the new address type to the Location Types list in the General section.

How Rock Handles People and Families

Now that you've seen how individuals and families are added and edited in Rock, let's talk about how Rock helps you keep that information current.

Imagine having to manually update the ages of individuals in your organization whenever birthdays occur, or the grades of children at the start of each new school year. It would be a daunting, never-ending task! Thankfully, Rock uses automated calculations to update people and families, so you don’t have to. Let's look at which information is automated and how Rock makes the calculations.

Age

Rock calculates an individual’s age by comparing their birthdate to the current date. Why make things more complicated than they need to be?

Age Classifications

In Rock, an Adult is anyone over the age of 18 or marked as an adult in one or more families. A Child is anyone less than 18 or a child in all families. If either of those conditions aren't met, the individual is marked as Unknown.

Rock calculates age each time a person is saved and re-calculates it every time the Rock Cleanup job is run. The value is then saved in the Age Classification property on the Person model, where it's made available to use in Data Views, Reports and other filtering operations.

Grade

Rock calculates a person's grade using their graduation year and the global attribute Grade Transition Date. When an individual’s graduation year is entered into their Person Profile, Rock compares that year to the Grade Transition Date to determine the individual’s grade. You can configure the Grade Transition Date in the Global Attributes screen, located at Admin Tools > Settings > General > Global Attributes.

For more details on grades in Rock, see the School Grades chapter below.

Primary Family

Individuals belonging to more than one family will be assigned a primary family. This is recorded behind the scenes as the Primary Family ID and is initially associated with the family that was entered into Rock first.

Because it’s stored behind the scenes, you typically won’t see the Primary Family ID. However, on the Person Profile page, the primary family will be whichever family is at the top of the list for the individual. So, you can change the primary family by clicking and dragging the  icon for the desired family to the top of the list. While the Primary Family ID isn’t visible, behind the scenes it will be updated in real time according to your changes on the Person Profile.

School Grades

Rock provides a customizable system for determining the grade or year of an individual's education and automating promotion from one grade to the next. For most organizations in the US, the out-of-the-box configuration should meet all their needs. For international organizations or those in locales where customization is required, it's easy to adjust the system.

When adjusting the grades, the first thing to keep in mind is that Rock only stores the year that someone graduates from the educational system. In the US, that's their high school graduation. Rock dynamically calculates a person's grade by:

1. Comparing the current date to their graduation year which provides an offset in years. Rock also uses the Grade Transition Date Global Attribute to help determine the start of the school year.
2. The year offset from step 1 is then compared with the grades in the School Grades defined type. The first Defined Value (grade) whose value is greater than or equal to the offset is selected. For systems that have one grade for each year, this is a simple setup. The last grade (senior year in the US) would have a value of 0, the next (junior) a value of 1, etc. For systems where a grade spans multiple years, you would "skip" years. For example, to have a Middle School grade level instead of separate 7th and 8th grades, you would set the Value of Middle School to 5, and the next higher grade level (Freshman) to 3.

When adding a new person to the system you're asked to provide their grade. The person’s graduation year is initially determined by the grade provided, using the reverse of the above logic.

Knowing that not every system uses the term Grade, Rock allows you to configure the term that’s used by editing the Grade Label global attribute under Admin Tools > Settings > General > Global Attributes. So, if you’re more familiar with “year” or “level” it’s easy to adjust accordingly.