Analyzing Donors by Constituency Code

Courtney Taylor

Most donors in our database have 10-15 constituency codes.  We want to compare how each constitutency code gives, but realize we're going to see some duplication in counting gifts...any suggestions? 

Leilani McHugh

Are you using a Gift Detail and Summary Report?  If you enter the constituency code on each gift (gift constituency code), then you can go to filters in a gift detail/summary report, select Constituent Codes/Include Selected/  and then choose "Use constituent code from - gift".    Or if you do not use the gift constituency code, you can choose "Use constituent code from - constituent" and base your selection from either the Constituent or from your Table.  Your gifts (as long as you don't call for soft credit to both in the general tab) will not be duplicated.  In the general tab of the report, choose "summary" and in the format tab of the report, choose "Detail - summarize by constituency code."  Hope that helps!

JoAnn Strommen

Yikes.  



That sure seems like a lot to me.  Say I have codes of Alumni/Member, Dog Lover, Republican, Trivia Expert, Provides Emergency Aid, VIP, etc. how will your comparisons provide valuable data?  Am I giving to your appeal because it has a picture of dog on it, provides aid to Nepal, because I just got my tax return or some other reason? 



Besides being overwhelmed by recording/tracking that many constituencies I'm having trouble seeing value in reports.  Guess I'm missing something.



Can't get to your original post here to re-read.  Looks like this is a new thread or something.



Wish you the best on it...

Christine Cooke 2

Wow!  that seems like a lot of Constit codes for one record.  I would suggest using the Comparisons and Summaries report under Demographic and Statistical reports. You can choose to either include a donor in EVERY record or by HIERARCHY.  Of course, hierarchy will be useless unless your Org has established a hierarchy and your records reflect that -- with the primary constit code listed at the top on Bio Tab 2. 

And -- you can also utilize the Gift Constit Code, but it is based on the hierarchy established on Bio Tab 2, so if that has not been consistant then your data will be muddled untill you backtrack and clean it up.  This report gets all the info on one page.



The other way to get the info is to use Gift Detail and Summary report under Financial Reports -- but you will have to pull a separate report for each Constit Code and since you have so many codes, that would be quite a project.

Karen Stuhlfeier

It's interesting that you can base the hierarchy on the way your table is set up in configuration in Export but can't do that in Report. I use that a lot in an Export when I want to be able to separate constituents by their primary constituent code. That would be a nice feature to have in Report. 

Madeleine Holdsworth

The lesser the constituency codes, the better.  Multiples cause nightmares with reporting or pulling lists.

Gina Gerhard

Just to make sure there's clarity on use of the 'primary' constituency code vs. additional constituency codes.



Raiser's Edge does a fairly good job at allowing you to identify the top level code as the 'primary' code and in query and export, there's a separate section for the Primary constituency code.

• We use this top level primary code to identify on at a high level how we work with this constituent - so we less than 10 codes (Individual, Student and the rest distinguish different types of organizations - Nonprofits, Corporate/Business, Foundations-Private ... etc.)
• We then use additional constituency codes for more granular identification.

So I think it's much more workable if you create this two-level use of constituency codes, so you can choose to stay 'top-level' or get more granular if needed.