[REEuser]

Dear all

We are in the midst of streamlining our constituent codes and just wanted to ask if any of you make a distinction betwen university staff and university faculty, and use them as constituent codes.

Thank you.


Gordon

[Nina Williams]

We have a constituent code of Faculty/Staff. We have an attribute of current employee, with a comment of faculty or staff. We do it this was because many of our faculty are alumni and we wanted to keep Alumni their constituent code. The person who set up our RE convinced all here that a record could only have ONE constituent code and believe it or not that there could not be more than 10 constituent codes all total. It kept the system very clean, but we have attributes for everything.

[nhenriqu]

We are in the midst of implementing RE and we do seperate Staff, Faculty, Alumni and have other 'consituency codes' for further categorization. RE does support the capture of mutliple consituency codes and so far we have not been told or encountered any limitations to the number of codes that can be associated with a consituent. So for sure you can have more than one, but what we cannot establish at this point is wether or not there are any impacts on performance, functionality, etc.
Nigel

[Jo Ward]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nhenriqu

We are in the midst of implementing RE and we do seperate Staff, Faculty, Alumni and have other 'consituency codes' for further categorization. RE does support the capture of mutliple consituency codes and so far we have not been told or encountered any limitations to the number of codes that can be associated with a consituent. So for sure you can have more than one, but what we cannot establish at this point is wether or not there are any impacts on performance, functionality, etc.
Nigel

Raiser's Edge can support multiple constituency codes with little impact on performance. What you must remember and be careful of is that the processing is hierarchical. That means that if you have multiple constituency codes, the most important one should be at the top of the list. For example, you might have as constituentcy codes board member, parent, current student, alumni, etc. It is conceivable that a board member could also be a parent or other combinations.. You must decide, which of these is more important to your organization, and that code should be listed first. When looking for primary constituency code, RE will look from the top down until it finds a valid code. Valid, in this case means that if you are using date to and date from values, the date of the query must fall within the range specified by date from and date to.

The use of multiple codes allows you to categorize your constituents with more flexibility and allows for overlap for those constituents who are heavily involved with your organization.

Hope this helps.

Jo

[Melissa Siobhan]

To further comment on Jo's post, the heirarchy is very important but it is not just simply the top one that is important. It is the primary constituency or the top-most Valid code. So as she said if you use dates and the top one has an end date in it of last year then RE will pull the next valid one as the primary constituency code.

You will need to pay attention on reports whether or not you have selected to use primary or have the information listed in ALL codes for that constituent. (this is usually on the format tab under details if that report has that option) Typically you would only want primary as all would create duplicate information but, who knows, maybe someday you need to use all. I beleive the default is primary.

I am currently at a place where each record only has one and we usee too many attributes. Where I was previously I liked having multiples so you could use the dates for board member, former board member, volunteer, etc. if someone was all of the above. We now only use attributes which have only one date. UGH.

If you are just setting up I would be careful not to have too many constituent codes. Rarely are more than a dozen needed but sometimes. I would not limit yourself to one per record but I would set strict guidelines on how you use the heirarchy. If someone is a board member and an alumni where they are reflected in reports is important and it needs to be consistent.

[Melissa Siobhan]

One more comment - constituent code is located on Bio2 (Org 2) but it is also available on every gift you enter on Tab 2. If you use multiple codes on Bio 2 you can be very specific with each gift and put it in the code to go with that gift. You can then report on Gift constituent code rather than primary constituent code and get very accurate results.

I find this works best on some reports where you are reporting on multiple date ranges as RE sometimes puts all the constituent's gifts in one category along the whole report even if they switch from board member to former board member in the middle. Using gift constituent code properly on each gift will move all gifts made after that date to the proper code. RE should do this but on some multiple date range reports it does not.

[Melody Penner]

In response to your original question about the distinction between University staff and University faculty, we do not…….. We use the constituent code "Staff"fficeffice" />>>
> >
I have suggestions of things for you to consider...>>
Do you or do you plan to store all university staff data in Raiser's Edge or are they just donors who happen to be staff ? ......If you store all data, by all means be more specific.>>
When reporting... do you think you would be expected to differentiate between university faculty & university staff? If so, is there any other way you could do it?>>
>>
In our case, we have a separate database for staff data. (Not by our choice but how the university systems are set up) Only our staff donors are added to Raiser's Edge along with their staff id number.>>
Using a view that has been set up for us in Access we can check our constituents with a staff id number against the staff ids in the view to determine details on where they work and what their position is (faculty or support) if that is required. >>

Hope that is helpful
Melody

[Melody Penner]

Sorry, don't know what happened there that was suppose to say
We use the constituent code STAFF