Creating new constituent codes

Jacqueline Stevens

We are looking to create some new codes to help us track benefactors of scholarships, prizes and awards.

Faith Murray

We generally track this under Attributes, so as to keep our Constituent codes clean. If you have 10 different awards, you would need 10 Cons Codes, whereas under Attributes you could have one "Awards" attribute with a drop-down menu. I concur that keeping a historical record of award-winners is a very useful practice.


What was your question exactly?

Tom Klimchak

We do most of this with relationships. We actually have donors AND recipients of scholarships all related to the particular scholarship fund in most cases.

Rose Dixon

Tom, I'd like to clean up our constcodes, but some feel we really need things like "Board, Employee, Former Board, Former Employee" as secondary constituent codes. Where do you keep that info - in attributes?

JoAnn Strommen

I know you directed question to Tom, but one can clean up codes and still have secondary codes. Alumnus/a is always primary but we use board, faculty and those you listed as additional codes.

Miki Martin

Jacqueline Stevens‍, we have a code Scholarship Benefactors for the main person in charge of each scholarship we offer our students. In database view, I then create a relationship (kind of what Tom Klimchak‍ has mentioned, I think) with the appropriate fund to link that person to the fund and can query this information so we have an accurate list each year of our scholarships and their contact person. Our database is mainly for Advancement but since our office handles these things we track the scholarships. We do not handle any other awards but I would think you could apply the same general concept to it.


I also like Faith Murray‍'s suggestion of utilizing Attributes with a dropdown for specific awards. Our Attributes are currently overrun with redundant data so I haven't had a need yet to utilize it for us.


Something we have just started doing in our database is tracking our mentors and mentees. Our alumnae (all girls' school) have an opportunity to be a mentor to an upperclassman and go through an application process. This is tracked with dates through Relationships so we know who had whom when in case a girl has one mentor her junior year and another her senior year. We can also then see the history for each alumna. So relationships can be quite useful.

Rose Dixon‍, many of our constituents have several codes. Alumnae is always at the top, but many are current or former parents, faculty or staff, scholarship benefactors and/or board members, to name a few. As JoAnn mentioned, the one on top is the primary but you can have multiple. Sometimes an Attribute is better, though, if it's a minor thing you want to track.

Martha Lauria

Hi, Tom, Would you kindly point me in the right direction where I might find a list of most commonly used constituent codes? We are also in the midst of cleaning up and updating ours. Thank you.