Constituency Code = Donor

David Crandall

I just started a new development position at a small hospital, and our Raisers Edge needs some cleaning up.  Our largest constituency code is "Donor".  Does anyone else use that as a constituency code?  It seems to me that tells me very little about their relationship to the organization.  

Dariel Dixon 2

At my institution we use the constituency code of donor.  Often times, we don't have any idea as to the relationship of these individuals to the organization, just that we received a gift from them.  Many times, healthcare institutions don't have a built in constituency like education organizations do.

Claudia Sauers

When I was at a healthcare organization we stuck to non clinical relationships, such as donor, employee, med staff ,etc. Aside from patient relationships those are typically the relationships healthcare orgs have and we never added anything patient related.

Sunshine Reinken Watson

I would assign that code to general donors who don't have a specific relationship yet.

JoAnn Strommen

We use that constituency code. If you're a school, alumnus may be your most used or some other one depending on your org type. It is definitely our primary one. We actually also have "Donor-Branch A" etc to quick filter donors to our branch Y's.

Gracie Schild

I've never been a fan of "Donor" as a Constituency Code, but either that or "Individual" is pretty common. What bugged me the most (and I cleaned up wherever I found it) was that "Donor" was the primary Constituency Code but one or more secondary codes existed - including "Alumni" or "Board Member". Sheesh! It's only a place holder till something "real" comes along. I deleted it whenever something useful existed next to it. You're right, David - it adds no value in most cases.

Tom Klimchak

We don't like "Donor" because it's essentially a duplicate value of what's already been entered somewhere else in the database (giving tab).  This creates a few problems:

It's vague:  Is a "Donor" only a hard credit donor?  Soft credit donor?  Cash?  Committed?  Does the word "donor" mean different things to different people?  Did the word "Donor" mean the same thing 10 years ago?

It's a duplicate value:   If you want to find donors, you can do so by querying giving records, not entering a second code.  Double-coding is inefficient and almost always leads to accidental errors down the line.  I bet you have some "Donors" with no giving and some people with giving but no Donor code.  It's natural (but not good)....


We DO have a generic catch-all code.  It's "Friend"... it mostly applies to individuals and we put on it on records we have to create but probably won't hear from again.  Friends could be one-time donors, event attendees, volunteers or anyone else we need to track but don't have any other close contact with us (Alumnus, Trustee, Parent, etc)....


If a Friend eventually becomes a parent or alumnus or anything else we remove the Friend code and keep the more important code.  

Heather MacKenzie

David Crandall‍ , take a look at what your reporting needs are for any surveys, reports for your board and/or president, etc. and see if that can help guide you.  One massive survey that we do each year heavily influenced our constituent codes.  We do use "Individual," but we have more than one type of individual, so they are Individual, Individual-Employee, Individual-Physician and so on as needed.  Our total list is about 15.

Elizabeth Johnson

We are a school so not exactly the same. I agree with earlier comments that donor is redundant. We distinguish constituencies for individuals that make gifts and their relationship to our school is unknown in two distinct ways; "Friend" and "Tribute Donor". Anyone that gives a tribute to our school is kept active for two years unless they have new interactions, like additional gifts or attend an event. Friends don't have a set date to become inactive. Good luck David Crandall‍ in your new position!

Karen Hartt

We have Donor as a constituency code. I strongly advocated against it, but our Philanthropy department wanted an "easier" way to group folks, and constituency code was my compromise.

We are a community foundation and use many constituency codes to "define" folks in our database, the constituency codes show up on the bottom of the bio 1 tab so staff don't have to search for the attributes.