Coding Donor Behavior: Time of Year, Area of Support, and Contact Preference

Lesley Larson

Without creating a complex system of Solicit Codes, Mail Exclusions, and Attributes, I'd like to code/categorize and query based on giving time of year, areas of support, and the preferred method the donor likes to be contacted. This would help with both segmentation and stewardship. Our database size is about 14K constituents. Has anyone else successfully built a "donor profile" with this information in Raiser's Edge or Raiser's Edge NXT and can share best practices, lessons learned, etc.? I'd be grateful for your help!

JoAnn Strommen

Haven't tried it but if I needed to do it, I'd use 3 similarly named attributes. Something like Segment Giving Time / Segment Preferred Contact Method / Segment Area of Support. I would create tables for the description fields of the attributes. Keep these limited in options. Limit attribute to one per record for first two. For Area of  Support, will you list more than one area? Then I'd allow multiples of this one.  Will make it much cleaner for querying/ reporting.

I don't think it would be too complex.  All info on one tab and query-able.


Other option might be re-purposing some fields on Bio 2 tab but I think attributes is better, especially as some of those fields don't pull over into NXT.