A consultant has installed NPSP and is setting up Relationships using List Settings. The nonprofit wants the reciprocal relationship to be selected…

NPSP's automated reciprocal relationship feature relies on a "Gender" field to determine the correct corresponding relationship. For example, if Contact A's relationship to Contact B is "Spouse," the reciprocal relationship for Contact B to Contact A will be set to "Spouse." However, for gendered relationships like "Husband/Wife" or "Son/Daughter," NPSP needs to know the gender of the other contact in the relationship. Since relationships are between individuals (Contacts), the Gender field must reside on the Contact object for the logic to function correctly.

A. Relationship: The Relationship object records the connection between two Contacts; the personal attributes like gender belong to the Contacts themselves, not the connection.

C. Account: Accounts represent households or organizations. A gender field is not applicable to these entities and is not used by the NPSP reciprocal relationship logic.

D. Affiliation: An Affiliation links a Contact to an Account. It does not store personal demographic data like gender used for reciprocal relationships between two Contacts.

1. Salesforce.org NPSP Documentation, "Create and Manage Reciprocal Relationships". Section: "Enable Gender-Specific Reciprocal Relationships". This section explicitly states, "To use gender-specific reciprocal relationships, you must first create a Gender field on the Contact object."

2. Salesforce Help, "Configure Reciprocal Relationships". Step 2 under "Set Up Gender Fields" instructs: "Create a custom picklist field on the Contact object. We recommend you label it Gender."