Affiliations
The institutions members belong to, kept as one list rather than a free-text field repeated a thousand times.
An affiliation is an institution — a university, hospital, company or agency — that members belong to. It exists as its own record so that "University of Ibadan", "Univ. of Ibadan" and "UI" end up as one row rather than three.
Why it is a record, not a text field
Free-text employer fields decay immediately: every misspelling becomes a separate group, and any report grouped by institution is wrong from day one. Horbit stores a normalised name alongside the display name and compares incoming values against it, so near-identical submissions land on the existing record instead of creating a new one.
Use cases
Cleaning up after an import
An import of several thousand members typically carries hundreds of spellings of a few dozen institutions. Near-duplicates are surfaced for merging: the surviving record keeps its name and address, and every member pointing at the merged record is repointed.
Targeting by institution
Because affiliation is a real reference, an email campaign can be filtered to one
institution's members, and {{affiliation}} resolves per recipient in the body
of the message.
Self-service registration
The public join page offers existing affiliations as you type and accepts a new one when nothing matches, so the list grows without an administrator gate while still avoiding duplicates.