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<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Navigation: EDITING CATEGORIES > Donor Categories |
Donor Categories are two independent lists options that you can use to categorize your donors, if you wish. They are entered into the Category 1 and Category 2 fields that are part of the Donor Details, by selecting a value from a drop-down list.
You do not have to use these donor categories at all (unlike donation categories, which must be used). The lists of them are maintained just like donation categories are maintained, via the menu options Maintenance ⇒ Donor Category 1 and Maintenance ⇒ Donor Category 2. You must use those menu options before you can enter the Category 1 and 2 values, or there will be no available values to select in the drop-down lists!
Note: You can also get to those maintenance windows by selecting the "<Add New>" entry on the Category 1 or Category 2 drop-down list in the Donor Details area of the main window (in which case you will immediately have the cursor put into a new empty row, where you can enter a new donor category's name).
As an example of their use, one set of categories might be used to track members vs. attenders of a church, while the other set of categories might be used to track high, medium or low donors.
You can actually change the names of these two fields from Category 1 and Category 2 to whatever you want, to represent what they are each lists of, by changing the Category 1 Label and Category 2 Label fields in the Donor tab of the Maintenance ⇒ Main Window Options window. If you do that, all related prompts, menu options etc. will change accordingly. For instance, if you set Category 1 Label to "Membership Status", the menu option Maintenance ⇒ Donor Category 1 will instead read Donor Membership Status (Category 1).
You would probably not want to use Donor Categories to track characteristics of your donors in cases where they can have more than one value from the same list, because you can only pick one Category from each of the two Donor Category lists for each donor. For instance, suppose a church had multiple committees that some of its donors sit on, and some donors sit on more than one committee. Then using Donor Category 1 to record which committee a donor sits on would not really work, because you could only record the first committee. Instead, see Groups and Committees for a good way to track multiple-choice options.
On the Donor Categories window you can click the New button or press Enter to add a new category. To edit the name of an existing category, just click into the name and make your changes, then press Enter or click the Save button to save your changes. Click the Cancel button or press ESC to undo an edit, or to not save a category entered with the New button.
You can click Delete to delete an unused category that you have selected by clicking on it. It will not let you delete a category that is being used by one or more donors. (If you decided that you should not have used that category, you could find those donors, change their category to some other category, and then delete the category.)
If you try to change the name of a category that already has donors using it, you are prompted to make sure that is what you want to do. Changing the name will change the category on all donors that currently use that category.
Click Close or press ESC when you are done editing donor categories.
Non-Receiptable Donor Categories
Some donors on your list may not be supposed to ever receive an official receipt generated by the Receipt menu options. One example would be if you have a donor such as "Cash", in which you enter all anonymous cash donations. At least in Canada, you should also never issue official charitable receipts to other charities, if they donate to you.
You can mark donors as Non-Receiptable, so that they never receive a receipt, by creating special values in either (or both!) of the Donor Category 1 or Donor Category 2 lists, and selecting one of those values for the Non-Receiptable donor.
You will notice that beside each Category name on this maintenance window, there is a display-only field "Receiptable", to show whether that category is Receiptable or Non-Receiptable. It shows a check mark for Receiptable, or an "X" for Non-Receiptable. This is based on the categories being Non-Receiptable if they contain exactly "Non-Receiptable", or start with "NR " ("NR", plus a space), or end with " NR" (a space, plus "NR"). ("NR" alone is not sufficient - it must start or end with that, and have an extra space as explained in the previous sentence.) Examples of the latter would be "Member NR" or "NR Member". "NR" is an abbreviation for "Non-Receiptable".
Individual donations can also be marked as Non-Receiptable, even for donors who are otherwise Receiptable. For details on the ways to mark a donation as Non-Receiptable, please see Non-Receiptable Donors and Donations.