Good list of Constituency Codes for UK Charity

Mark Palfrey

I wanted to see if anyone was willing to share their list of constituency codes specifically for a UK Charity. I am starting to research what would be a good list that follows best practice but all the examples I could find online are Alumni based or not really reflective of a UK Fundraising charity. We are mainly a Fundraising based organisation so most of our current codes are around donors types and community fundraising and Major Giving. However they have become quite specific and require quite a bit of maintenance so I am looking to see what other organisations have come up with that works for them as a bit of inspiration for us.

Christine Robertson

@Mark Palfrey I will absolutely defer to @Rachel Cavalier (and anyone else in the UK), but in my experience working with orgs in the US, UK, CA and beyond, I've not found much to lead me to believe that there are constituent codes that are specific to any country.

I find constituent codes to be most useful when they indicate the constituent's connection to your organisation. So, for a school, that would include parents, alumni, etc. For a social service organisation, that likely would include staff, board, program participants, etc. as well as foundations, corporations and other entities that you partner with.

Mark Palfrey

@Christine Robertson Thank you so much for replying to my post. Totally agree regarding constituency codes and not being specific to any country. For all the examples from webinars etc.. I just find that none of these seem to fit with what we are looking for.

So for example some mention that its not recommended to have Constituency Code describe a level/type of giving e.g. Mid-Value Donor, Major Donor, Individual Giver, Regular Donor etc… as you can determine this all from the Giving history. So therefore what code would be given to these constituents as we have a multiple range of donor types that we want to be able to group by easily or for staff to see at a glance what they are. Balancing that with not having the burdened with managing these codes or having to decide which takes priority over another etc… Again any guidance or thoughts would be really useful. It might be just me over thinking it all! ?

JoAnn Strommen

@Mark Palfrey I would agree with not having constituent codes for giving levels. Maintaining accuracy would be a headache.

I've always used the guideline: Why are they in our database? As @Christine Robertson cited what is connection to the org? If is is because they support your org and no other specific reason, perhaps 'Friend of Royal Free.' At previous org we did use code of ‘Donor’ as we had records for 3 different branches: Donor, Custer Donor… So much cleaner than having to filter by gift funds for every query.
What type of filtering do you anticipate needing that can not be done by other bio data/giving data? That may help in deciding.

Rachel Cavalier

@Mark Palfrey

I agree with Christine that there's not really constituent codes that are specific to a country but yes - those for a university or school are different to those from other kinds of charitable organisations.

We do have constituent codes that correspond to giving levels in the sense that we have some for Patrons, Friends, Young Patrons and some others. We've taken this approach as not everyone has the expertise to dig into giving history etc to say "oh yes, this constituent is a Patron" and often being able to immediately tells some basics about someone who has just phone is very useful - but these are giving programmes that we have and that's how these supporters relate to our organisation. For the management side of things for these, it's the responsibility of the colleagues managing those programmes and they are pretty fastidious about this part of the stewardship.

We do, however, have rules about what order constituent codes should go in because in webview only the top few are immediately visible and the rest are hidden behind a "and X more..." link. We also have a list with definitions of each constituent code so that everyone knows exactly what they should be used for (providing they look at the guide!) and consider carefully each time we add one whether it might be better served with something other than another constituent code and give suggestions for this.

I can send you our document about it on Tuesday (after the bank holiday) - just message me your email address.

Christine Robertson

@Mark Palfrey Given the work that you do, I would imagine connections to NHS might be more valuable (knowing that someone is an NHS employee perhaps) than donor information. Your list very well could be much smaller than a school's list (I find those to be the longest usually).

The issue I have with donor labels is that without the context of the gift, they are usually fairly useless. For example, if I have a code of “Recurring Gift Donor” it doesn't tell you when I made my recurring gift, if it is actually still current, etc. Technically, I could have that code even if I never made a Recurring Gift (if someone made a mistake).