Constituent categories

in this article:

What are custom constituent categories?

Constituent categories make it possible to segment, or code, your constituents in different ways. Constituent segmentation is critical to donor management, and Little Green Light enables you to create and manage constituent categories in a flexible way so that you can segment or code your donors exactly how you want. Constituent categories are the best way to keep your constituents organized and to facilitate the creation of targeted lists, reports, and mailings.

A custom category is designed to hold a controlled value that can be applied to multiple records. The values are “controlled” because:

  • You have decided that you want to use them to categorize your data records, and 
  • You are maintaining the values and plan to re-use them for multiple records over time

IMPORTANT NOTE: Categories are only useful as a controlled list of choices you can use to quickly scan and build queries. For example, a category should never be used for a value that might change from one record to the next, such as a date or an amount. Attempting to use categories in this way will not be useful or manageable over time.

From the Constituent Details page, you can add or update all categories by clicking the Edit all categories button in the screenshot above.

Create and manage custom constituent categories

Custom constituent categories can be used to track information about a constituent that’s important to your organization. They allow you to classify your constituents in more ways and to customize the ways offered by default in your account. Customizing constituent categories can make it easier to find different or multiple types of constituents by searching or using filters.

It is common, for example, to use groups to identify board members, staff, volunteers, or prospects, and each of these can be considered a primary relationship or constituent classification. By default, LGL provides the constituent category of "Groups", with the default values of "Board Member", "Staff", "Team Member", and "Volunteer". These values can be edited, customized, or removed as needed to use the Groups category as a primary relationship or constituent classification.

You may want to record information about a constituent in additional ways that are not so primary, however. Common examples include “volunteer interest,” “volunteer skills,” and “source,” which you could use to identify volunteers by their areas of interest, their skills, or how they connected with you (through an event, referral, or other method). That information can be tracked in a custom constituent category and used to communicate with those volunteers who have specific interests or skills when related opportunities arise.

To create or edit custom categories, navigate to the Settings tab in your account and choose Menu Items. Explore the categories and their values that are currently available and determine whether any need to be updated or added for your purposes. To add one of more of your own constituent categories, click the Add a category button at the top of the page. 

You can edit existing constituent categories and values by selecting the Edit menu button for the category or the Edit button for the value.

NOTE: If no Edit menu button is available for a category, this indicates it is a default system category or value that cannot be edited, updated, or removed because it has specific meanings and behaviors.

Additionally, non-default values can be deactivated and merged if a duplicate is accidentally created. If a value is deactivated, it will not remove the value from the constituent record. Instead, it will hide the value from view and prevent any additional records from being assigned to that value. Once a value has been deactivated, it can be removed, which will permanently delete the value from LGL. If a value is deactivated, it can also be restored.

After creating your category (step 1 in the screenshot below), use the Add values button (step 2) to create the values associated with this category. These values can then be assigned to your constituents for each category. 

Two types of custom categories are available, which you choose as you are creating a new one:

  • Multi select, which allows you to assign more than one value to the category for a particular constituent
  • Single select, which means a constituent can only ever have a single value for that category at any given moment

Deleting constituent categories

To fully remove a constituent category from your account that contains values, all of the values will first need to be deactivated and then deleted. Once you have removed all of the values and the category is empty, you can then delete the entire menu. To remove it from your account, click the Delete menu button.

Watch a video on managing custom constituent categories

Watch this excerpt of a training video describing the custom constituent categories that are available in Little Green Light, and how you can customize them to suit your organization’s needs (12:59).

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