I have a lovely south facing window next to my desk at the FundRaiser office. Early this spring I replaced the sinuous vines that had been growing on the windowsill next to my desk. They had been slyly trailing beneath my desk, giving me the impression that they were ready to wrap around my feet and drag me under the moment I wasn’t paying attention.
I decided that sweet, innocent strawberry plants would be a lovely replacement. After all, there could be nothing sinister about the fresh green, rounded leaves and delicate white blossoms with their cheery yellow centers. The vines went into the compost pile and five small strawberry plants took their place in fresh new soil. The plants seemed very happy in their new home and the June bearing variety quickly produced blooms followed by small tart berries. Then the runners spouted. It began with a single, innocent shoot. Now the longest one is relentlessly reaching for me across the top of my desk. Time to find the pruning shears....
A coding scheme in your donor management software can be very much like these vines.
There is a very fine line between coding that allows you to easily separate donors out for reports and groupings and coding that is so complex it makes groupings very difficult. One example that comes to mind is an organization that put a different Purpose code in each gift that corresponded to a geographic region and a particular letter. There were hundreds of these codes and ALL of them had to be included in a grouping, yet there were only three geographic areas which were what they really needed. We solved the problem by adding a category code to each person who had gifts from one of these geographic regions. This narrowed the codes she needed to enter from hundreds to three. You might say…. we pruned their vines.
When using codes, remember that Category Codes are donor specific, while Gift Codes apply to the donations. If you want to flag a piece of important information about your donors (such as interests, board member, or even geographic region), you will use a Category Code. If; however, your goal is to flag something important about the gift (like Motivation, Source, Purpose), you'll use a Gift Code. These codes can be combined in Groupings, so you can easily see donors who are, for example, interested in one of your programs, and have also attended at least one of your events in the past. Using codes to track important information about your donors is a critical component to your donor management software, and, if used properly, can provide a wealth of important information for donor prospecting. FundRaiser offers both top-quality technical support and excellent web-based training sessions to help familiarize you with the coding process, so that you can take full advantage of your fundraising software.
If you have questions about coding please feel free to contact Tech Support at 800-543-4131