Constituent Codes for Employees / Retirees

Kim Berry

We're still fairly new to RE and haven't made many changes yet, but I'm wondering what the collective thought is regarding constituent codes for employees and retirees.


We have a code for current employees and one for retirees.  The data we rolled over does not have a start date for employees, and in general we are not adding one when we add new employees to RE.  Just went to update a recent retiree and the constituent code area looks like this:



Here's my question - since we don't have historical data on employee start dates and most likely won't be recording them in the future (not our role to track that info), what do you think about simply removing the Current Employee constituent code when they become a retiree? 

Faith Murray

Kim Berry:


We're still fairly new to RE and haven't made many changes yet, but I'm wondering what the collective thought is regarding constituent codes for employees and retirees.


We have a code for current employees and one for retirees.  The data we rolled over does not have a start date for employees, and in general we are not adding one when we add new employees to RE. Here's my question - since we don't have historical data on employee start dates and most likely won't be recording them in the future (not our role to track that info), what do you think about simply removing the Current Employee constituent code when they become a retiree? 

If all Retirees are by definition former Employees, then I think it would make perfect sense to simply delete the Current Employee Constituent Code. If you were using the start and end dates, it would benefit past years' financial reporting to keep them, but if not using the date fields, it doesn't seem like you gain much by keeping it - just extra clutter.


If, for some reason, Retirees can inlcude non-employee individuals, then it would make sense to keep both codes.

Karen Stuhlfeier

We also change the code to former employee instead of employee. My opinion is that the constituent code shows you how the constituent is currently connected to your organization. There are other places in the record that you can keep historical data if you want to. That's what works for us. 






 

 

Gina Gerhard

This is where I will (yet again) advocate for setting up an organization record for your own organization, and enter relationships for your staff members. 

• You can set up current staff members with Staff-Current as relationship, Employer as reciprocal.
  • Enter a Date From (if you know their start date).
  • Record their current title (in Position field).
  • You can set up attributes to capture additional detail about their employment, department, etc.
• As they leave or retire, you can change relationship to Staff-Former, enter the Date To, change their position to Former, etc.
• Use queries for current employees, former employees, both -- based on these relationships you've set up to your organization.

This method lets you accurately capture historical information and lots of detail around the employment.  

It also is a good way to handle staff that have had multiple employment terms (they've left, then come back).

 

JoAnn Strommen

You can see there are a lot of options and opinions.  A factor to me is what reporting you need now and in the future.  If you are reporting on current employee giving  at year end and have deleted that constituency code, I think your report may be inaccurate. Especially if you are filtering by constituency code vs. gift code.  I'd test that first.  Yes, I agree it's important to keep constituent code list manageable in size but not at the expenses of easily reporting. 

Karen Stuhlfeier

It really depends on what information is important to your organization. Keeping detailed information about past employees isn't that important to us. Their donations don't factor very much into the money we raise. We're interested in their participation while they are employees, but are usually just reporting on the current FY. I wouldn't want to spend too much time setting up a relationship record with them to our organization. You really need to decide what's important before putting a lot of work into something.

Jen Claudy

We get employee data from HR 2-3 times per year and use it for a variety of purposes.  Most of the detail is on the Volunteer Tab for us.  Much like JoAnn uses Relationship Records.  Board data is also there, and some Committees.


As to the Constituent Code, since we report on Gift Constituency, which defaults to the Primary Constituent Code at the time the Gift is entered, we have our current Employees with the Employee Const Code as Primary and their most recent start date.  When someone's employment is terminated, the Const Code is moved down and the end date is added (no longer Primary).  The dates aren't really necessary, as most Queries and Reports are run off the Volunteer Tab data, but the Constituent Codes show at the bottom of Bio 1 for us, so it's handy to have that there for both current and former employees (and not need a Business Rule pop up that has to be dismissed).  And in RE:NXT, it's nice to see the dates visible with the codes, too.

Christine Cooke 2

Kim Berry:


We're still fairly new to RE and haven't made many changes yet, but I'm wondering what the collective thought is regarding constituent codes for employees and retirees.


We have a code for current employees and one for retirees.  The data we rolled over does not have a start date for employees, and in general we are not adding one when we add new employees to RE.  Just went to update a recent retiree and the constituent code area looks like this:



Here's my question - since we don't have historical data on employee start dates and most likely won't be recording them in the future (not our role to track that info), what do you think about simply removing the Current Employee constituent code when they become a retiree? 

I agree with Faith.  The term Retiree is very specific.  Everywhere I have been we have utilized Employeee-Current and Employee-Former.  We also have a relationship to our Org with that individual in the Relationship tab and that is where we note where they are retired or not, in the Position field along with what they do/did. 


So when they are not longer with the Org, their Current gets changed to Former.