Collecting Demographic information on race, ethnicity, gender and age

Constance White

What methods do you use to collect demographic information?

JoAnn Strommen

As a university alumni foundation, this data is received from registrar's office.

Constance White

Thank you for the information

Faith Murray

For age and gender, you can apply a data append, which has a decent (thought not perfect) accuracy level. For ethnicity or race, I would hesitate to record that unless it were voluntarily offered by the donor, as otherwise you could get into some hairy liability issues. To capture that data, you could always employ them as optional demographic fields in an online survey ... or depending on your purpose and mission, offer them as optional data points for a membership program where you could connect members with like-minded groups in their regional area; or collect the data on select donors with the message that you want to engage a diverse team to assist with campaign leadership; etc.

Sandra BradfordJennings MHA

I want to start looking at the diversity of our donors. 80 percent of our program participants are people of color, but I have no idea if constituents from their ethnic groups are supporters or donors. No clue. Does only track race and ethnicity in Raiser's Edge? If you do, where do you track it?

JoAnn Strommen

The race and/or ethnicity data that we have is tracked in two repurposed fields on the Bio 2 tab.


Our data source is student info we receive from registrar upon graduation. We just recently add the race field.

Jenny Marquardt

Bio 2 has a field for Ethnicity. If you are not using the Religion field you could repurpose that field to race or add an attribute.

AnnMarie Schell

For some religious nonprofits, tracking religion is important to them too. Some would also want both race and ethnicity, though I discovered those definitions are not always clear to everyone. Here's a good article explaining it more thoroughly, What Is The Difference Between Race And Ethnicity? - WorldAtlas. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell us how to track race in RE, but you could always add an attribute.

Shimmy Ohana

Please bear in mind that in Europe, with GDPR, there are considerable legal issues (as opposed to just technical issues) regarding "storing" and "processing" this type of information

#JustSaying