FRBasic Tech Tips for Category Coding
Posted: April 2004Category codes allow for consistency which lets the computer group donor records. The point of a category is to standardize your entry so that it's easy to group everyone together who has the same code.
In FundRaiser Basic there are two fields, "Category1" and "Category2" (originally labeled "Category" and "Donor Source"), which are available for category coding. You can re-label these fields by first clicking on the Options Menu, then on General. Under “User Defined Category Captions”, you will find the Category1 and Category2 fields. Simply type the name of your new category caption in the white box. Click on the OK button when you are finished. Within each category, you can have as many as 255 codes. For instance if you re-label Category1 as “Donor Type”, you can have codes for board member, ex-board member, volunteer, and on up to 252 other divisions within that category.
Often, folks will type in the code they want, rather than choosing from the dropdown list. That can open up the possibility of typos creating second (or third, or fourth) codes by mistake. For “Board Member” you might have:
- Borad Member
- Board member
- BoardMember
- Brd Mbr
Each of these entries looks different to the computer, so doing a query in which you ask for all “Board Members” would miss a few. For this reason, we strongly encourage choosing from the dropdown, rather than typing the code.
If you have more codes then you want, Basic can rebuild the code lists by going to the File menu, choosing "Recreate code dropdown lists", and then deleting all the codes listed there and closing out of that section. It doesn't delete the codes from the donor records, just from the lists. Going back into that same section a second time will rebuild the lists according to codes that are currently being used on donor records.