Hi All,

My non-profit has recently gone through the process of updating/appending constituent records with more biographical information including race, religion, ethnicity, as well as other things. The question I have to all is; if you have updated your constituents race or ethnicity, and if you have how did you break it down? Right now we are trying to decide on what constitutes as a race, and what constitutes as an ethnicity. Any help with this will be greatly appreciated and welcomed. Please feel free to post here, or contact me at my email below.

Thank You!

Chris Yator

Database Intern SOS Childern's Villages-USA

cyator@sos-usa.org

I would not even attempt to try to make up my own list.  I would use a known list like this such as whatever the US Census Bureau uses.

I also would be very careful about what information you put on a constituent record as the word is that whatever you put on there the donor may someday ask to see and you would have to show them.  I would ONLY put on an ethnicity/raceif self-disclosed by the donor such as in a survey.

The only ethnicity data we enter is that provided by a Y member on their membership form.  I put the same 6 categories in RE that are on our membership forms (Asian American, African American, Hispanic, Native American, Caucasian, Other) so if they marked something I can just put the same info in RE.  Is your info coming from a written source?  If so, consider using that list.

 Thanks to all of your replies.

The appened data was actually given to us from a data collection company. The information was sent to us with both race and ethnicity. We were just wondering which fields would we store it in.Thank you for bringing up the question of whether we should store this data or not; I would like to here more opionions on the issue and why it would be negative if we use it just for internal reasons.

Chris Yator

Hi Chris,

I will probably have a piece of the following explanation incorrect but here goes. Colleges and universities report to the federal government about their students. One of the pieces of information that is reported is race/ethnicity. As far as I know the words race/ethnicity were used interchangably and were white, hispanic, black/african american, asian/pacific islander, american/alaskan native, unknown and multi-racial. Starting in September 2010, the reporting will change and ethnicity will be hispanic or non-hispanic. And race is all the others with asian and pacific islander broken out. If a person reports themselves as hispanic, that's it, they are hispanic and the rest is irrelevant. If a person reports themselves as non-hispanic, the other choices (now referred to as race) come into play.

At our college, we collect the information about the student once they graduate and import into RE. If this data is in the student information system it gets into RE. We have not decided what we are going to do now that the college is required to break the information out as I described above. I do know that we will continue to collect it. At times we get a request from the diversity office for names and addresses of alum who fit one or more ethnic groups. As far as I know we haven't done anything else with it.

There shouldn't be an issue if an alum asked to see their record as the information is self-reported. To be honest, I don't really know why it is captured except the vp of institutional advancement likes to capture every piece of data he can about someone. Which is part of his job, I guess.

I'm not sure any of this helps you any. I do know the red cross now asks at blood donation time about ethnicity and race in terms of hispanic/non-hispanic so I guess the feds are looking for something.

With everyone's concerns about privacy, I would almost suggest not importing the data if you don't think you will have a need for it. If there is something you think you can do with it (more ads in spanish/chinese/vietnamese/etc) it might be worth keeping.

 laura