Best practices: Using Groups in LGL

LGL constituent categories provide a powerful way to organize the people or organizations in your database and can be used to easily filter and sort by shared attributes to create segments. In this article, we discuss some best practices for using the LGL default category of Groups.

Groups is one of five constituent categories available in your LGL account by default. Default categories cannot be re-named, nor can they be removed from your account. You can, however, define the values that are associated with them. 

The category of Groups is used to store information about how a constituent is primarily affiliated with your organization. To determine what group values you should use in your account, we recommend thinking about how your constituents are engaged with your organization, and how you'll most likely want to sort or segment your database. For ease of use, it's a good idea to keep the number of group values small and focused (e.g., between 5 and 8), so thinking about these groupings at a high level makes sense.

In addition, we recommend against creating groups that will need to be regularly updated once a certain action has taken place; for example, a student has graduated, a prospect has donated, or a member becomes inactive, etc. For each of these specific scenarios, LGL offers special fields: class-year affiliation fields, membership fields, and giving status fields.

This table contains a few types of nonprofit organizations that use LGL and some common group values for each:

It's helpful to note that  Groups is a multi-select field, meaning that your constituents can have more than one value from that category associated with their record. So, if you wish to note that a constituent is an artist as well as a volunteer, for example, that can be noted in their record. 

Example of a constituent record with multiple group values: