Blackbaud Grantmaking currently creates significant confusion around how contact (job) titles are collected, stored, and linked between Contact records, Affiliation records, and Request records. In my experience, a primary contact's title can be collected successfully through an application form and appear in certain places within the platform, yet not be available where users would logically expect to find it - such as in search results, exports, merge templates, or the contact's primary organization information. The underlying relationship between Contact and Affiliation records is opaque, making it difficult for administrators to understand where title information is actually being stored and how it can be accessed.

The scenario I encountered highlights the issue. I collect a primary contact's job title through application forms using a Request Contact Table and expected that information to be consistently available across the system. Instead, I learned that titles may be stored and displayed differently depending on whether the contact is new or already exists in the database. The title might appear in a request flyout, be stored on an affiliation record, or update differently based on the type of contact table used. Support was helpful in clarifying the underlying architecture and explaining where the information ultimately resides. However, the explanation also underscored the larger challenge: users can successfully collect a contact title yet still be unable to reliably access that information in searches, exports, reporting, or merge templates.

As a result, my current workaround is to manually update the contact's title or role directly on the request record after data has already been collected through the application process, simply to ensure those fields are available for exports, mail merges, and other downstream workflows. While this workaround is technically effective, it is extremely time-consuming and difficult to scale across large numbers of applicants and requests. While the current behavior may align with the platform's underlying design, it creates an experience that is confusing for administrators and does not adequately support common grantmaking operations.

Blackbaud should establish a single, authoritative approach for handling contact titles and ensure they are synchronized across Contact records, Affiliation records, Request records, exports, reporting, and merge fields. Users should not need to understand the platform's underlying data architecture to use a basic piece of constituent information they have already collected. Standardizing this functionality would improve data integrity, reduce administrative burden, eliminate confusion around Contact versus Affiliation records, and create a more intuitive experience for organizations managing large numbers of applicants and contacts. At a minimum, if the current architecture cannot be changed, Blackbaud should provide a more practical and scalable workaround that allows contact titles collected through application forms to be reliably used in exports, reporting, and merges without requiring manual updates to individual request records.