Constituent Code for Non Profits

Rob Price

Our org decided years ago to use Organization for any non profit members and donors. I'm curious what others use. We have a Foundation code, which we don't consider to be the same thing. I think over the year, the ORG code has been used as a catch-all instead of its intended purpose. What do you think about using Nonprofit as a code, and the short code would be NPO?

Devan Bessinger

@Rob Price I would say it depends on how you use the Constituent Code field to slice, dice, & report on your data. We use the Constituent Code to indicate “why is this constituent in our database." So if that organization is a donor, their constituent code is Donor. If we need to report on donors that are orgs vs. individuals, we just utilize the Key Indicator field. We use the Industry field to capture what type of org it is, so we can use that field if we need to report on gifts & other activity for a specific type of org (like an NPO).

shani traum

@Rob Price We use Organization for things like schools, hospitals, etc. Basically, “businesses” that are non-profits. We use Foundation for, well, Foundations. In you case, I guess converting Org to NPO (as appropriate) more clearly defines what it is and makes it clear that you assigned an official code rather than a generic Org code.

Joe Moretti

@Rob Price It all depends on your organization, how you view organizations, reporting purposes, etc. Currently at our place we have Estate, Government, Foundation, Corporation, School and Other ORG (which relates to non-profits,, associations, things like that). In other places I have worked we had those plus Non-Profit, Church, Arts, It all depends on how you use the data. I feel that using Organization as a constituency does not really do anything, since the record will already have a Key Indicator of Organization. Again, it depends on if your organization needs to distinguish the type of organizations for reporting purposes, etc. Now you do not want to overload constituency and have too many, since you can always break down something like Other ORG further in an attribute table.

Lee Grisham

@Rob Price We also use Organization and it isn't only other nonprofits, but also community groups and the like. We have some HOA's and clubs that donate that don't really fit into the nonprofit, but we don't want to categorize them as corporate either.

We may be a little different as we have to report to Feeding America and have to separate them out for them as well. Mostly, we adhere to what their definitions are since it is easier for us to do our reporting and hasn't made any real impact on our work.

Karen Diener

@Rob Price I think nonprofit makes a lot of sense, but I would also be thoughtful about overapplying it. For example, I'm working with an organization that needs to report on Foundations as a group and “other organizations” as a separate group.

The problem is that Foundations are also nonprofits (as are religious institutions, educational institutions, etc.) so many of their Foundation records also have Nonprofit as a constituent code. While that isn't wrong, it is definitely cluttering their reporting at the moment because Foundations are pulling in multiple groups.

If you choose to use “nonprofit” it probably should be the only code on that record. As others have wisely stated though, this depends on your reporting.

Karen

Carrie Powell

@Rob Price, we have A LOT of constituent codes (not ideal), including 7 for organizations. Because we're a Catholic organization, we have multiple for different kinds of Catholic entities:

• Bus (business/corporation)
• Dio (diocese or archdiocese)
• Found (foundation)
• Org (other organization, such as higher ed, other nonprofits, national/international groups such as Rotary)
• Parish (and their associated groups, like sodalities)
• Order (religious communities)
• fndtru (charitable funds/trusts) – used for donor-advised funds or family trusts versus the larger foundations

I think many of these could be attributes instead, but it does help to have some distinctions among organizations rather than lumping them all together.