Clients

Clients are those you serve through the mission of your non-profit. Generally clients will be people, but in the context of Delightful Labor, if you wished to set up programs to sponsor chairs in an orchestra, paintings in a museum, puppies at a pet shelter, or water wells in a remote village, you could create client records for these items.

Clients can also be involved in short-term projects, such as children being sponsored for Christmas presents. Every year you can create a new sponsorship program, identify children in need of presents, and match them with donors in your organization.

Here's how Delightful Labor organizes clients:

• Clients are associated with a location. You set up your locations separately. You can associate certain sponsorship programs with your locations. For example, if your non-profit serves both infants and the elderly, you can associate the sponsorship programs for the elderly with retirement home locations, and infant sponsorship programs with day care facilities. In addition to managing your clients by location, you can maintain complet contact information: address, phone/cell, and email.

• At any point in time, each clients has a status. The status is selected from a list of possible statuses, grouped into status categories. For example, you may have a status category for preschoolers that includes status entries of newborn, infant, and toddler. A status category for older children may include status entries of elementary school, middle school, and high school. You can update a client's status at any time, and Delightful Labor will remember the client's entire status history. You can also change a client's status category as he or she transitions from one major grouping to another.

• You can annotate a client's status with your own notes. To help facilitate generating information packets to your sponsors, you can designate one of the client's status entries as a packet entry. When exporting information to create the sponsor packets, the designated status notes will be included.

• A client's status has several properties associated with it. A status can either allow or prevent sponsorship. A status can also allow or prevent the client appearing in the directories. For example, if a child has graduated from your program, you would chose a status that shows the child is no longer available for sponsorship and should no longer appear in the directories. Delightful Labor will maintain the child's records, but they won't be cluttering up directory listings.

• You can create a vocabulary that is associated with your clients. This helps personalize your relationship with them. Rather than referring to clients, sponsors, and locations, you can set up your vocabulary to refer to students, patrons, and classrooms. You can maintain as many different vocabulary groups as you need.