[Shanna G.]

I'm BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!

Where do you indicate on a constituent record how that constituent became affiliated with your organization?

Currently, we use an attribute called Source Code, but I'm thinking their might be a better way.

[Peter Gulka]

that is the specific purpose of constituent codes on Bio/org 2.
Because they have a start date and end date you can show a great
history of someone's evolution with your org.

[Anne Marie]

We use Appeal. As in their first gift would show the appeal they responded to - not necessarily a mailiing or whatever. It could be our web page, a brochure or whatever.

If it is something really special, I would create a note to expand. i.e. Big Boss met New Constituent at a presentation and convinced him to join up.

[Shanna G.]

I think the issue is that neither constituent code nor appeal capture everyone by themselves.

Giving someone the constituent code of Board Member 1/1/08 doesn't tell us how they came to even be a consideration, even if they have a secondary constituent code of Individual - how did they come to even be an individual. I think we'd end up with some seriously crazy constituent codes if we rely solely on that.

I thought about appeal solving the issue, but sometimes we have people that come to our org through an event we happened to be involved in (ie Disability Pride Parade or a college job fair) - we don't have appeals for that stuff because our involvement isn't with the intent to raise money.

The problem with our Source Code attribute is that the table is endless. I'd much prefer not to use it, but I'm not sure how to capture this information accurately without being repetitive. I believe that the Source Code attribute is a Blackbaud attribute, so there must be something to it (just not the way we're currently using it).

Any other suggestions?

[Melissa Siobhan]

I agree that constituent code and appeal code are not appropriate in the case where someone just suggested that we add them to our event invitation list, etc.

There are no Blacbaud Attributes. If there is an attribute in your database it was created by someone at your organization.

We are using an attribute called source but the description field is not text or a table - it is a constituent name. So the only sources we currently are tracking are other constituents. Not every record gets a source but if they are coming at the suggestion of a board member, staff or solicitor then we add the source code.

[wolfganghario]

We've adapted and re-named the income box in Bio 2 to use it as 'source'. However, this is pretty much the same as having it as an attribute. In our drop down we have fairly generic things like staff introduction, gallery, mailing list...etc. It relates to how they became affiliated and then our costituent codes are what they're relationship to us is now (board member, alumni, organisation contact...etc)

[vsiegel]

We use the Constituent Codes on Bio2 for this purpose... if you use the Date From and Date To fields, you can build an amazing history this way.

For example; "Gala Guest 2/2006 - 1/2007" , "Gala Attendee 2/2007 - (no end date)" , "Gala Committee 2/2008 - 1/2009"
or
"DM Prospect 5/2001 - (date of first gift)" , "Donor - (date of first gift) - (no end date)"