Constituent codes

Ellie Foster

Roughly how many constituent codes does your organisation have? I'm looking at cleaning up the constituent codes we have and was interested to hear how many others use.

Faith Murray

We have 13 primary CCodes, and all records must have one of those primary codes. We also have 15 other secondary CCodes that may or may not be present on a record. So when you set it up, ask yourself: If I wanted to view a report on giving-by-donor relationship, what fields would I want it broken down into? For us, that means that a donor who is an alumnus, foundation contact, and Board Member, will have an "Alumnus" primary CCode that is his main bucket category and where he will show up on all reports. The Board member and Foundation CCodes will be entered as secondary CCodes. Likewise, a different donor who is a Board Member only will have a "Friend" primary code with a Board Member secondary code.


You can have as many secondary codes as is useful for tracking, but I think it's important to keep the number of primary codes limited to what would be visibly digestible in a pie chart of donation revenue sources, or the number of segments you can realistically implement in a segmented mailing. We delineate between primary and secondary by making primary codes all in CAPS at the top of the table list in Config, and secondary codes all in proper case at the bottom of the table list. Data entry staff know they must include one capitalized CCode first on each record.

Heather MacKenzie

My org has about 10. In case you haven't already done so, I'd suggest searching the Community for other threads. I remember participating in other conversations about this topic.

Ellie Foster

Thanks very much, I will do!

Ellie Foster

That's really helpful, thank you!