Foundation Categorization best practice

Christopher Barona

My team is looking to differentiate how we manage foundation records, so I wanted to see if the community has some best practice advice on how to categorize them. Right now, we're thinking of splitting the “Foundation” constituency code into three constituency codes:

• Foundation, Charitable: Foundations created for their own charitable purposes
• Foundation, Corporate: Foundations created as an outgrowth of a separate corporate entity
• Foundation, Family: Foundations created by an individual or small group of individuals

Has anyone else done this or something similar? Is splitting the constituent code a good idea, or would putting it under attributes (or elsewhere) serve this purpose better? Are there other major foundation categories we may not have considered?

Dina Rieman

@Christopher Barona - We are going through the same process with exactly the same questions! Thank you for posting this - looking forward to the responses.

Jeannie Goings

@Dina Rieman and @Christopher Barona for the higher-ed vertical, CASE provides clear definitions for foundations: personal and family, community, private, and company sponsored foundations. FWIW we have ours split. The challenge is understanding how labels within an organization are defined AND having that information at the ready for the person who creates the the records.

Rebecca Entwisle

@Christopher Barona We recently divided our foundation records in just the same way. So far, we've not needed anything more complex.
We also make sure the Family Foundations have a relationship with the members of the family with types “Family Foundation/Giving Vehicle” and “Donor”.