Database Critical:
What’s At Your Fingertips?

By Rita Galowich President
Fund Inc., JB&A Strategic Partner

Have you ever been planning a solicitation call only to realize you do not have a solid history of information about the individual you will be meeting? Maybe your gift history is spotty. Your written notes concerning past contacts have holes in them, or are nowhere to be found. You realize that the consistency of recording donor and prospect information has been poor, at best.

What about planning for mail appeals? Can you segment your database to get the information necessary to highly personalize your mailings for increased response rates? Or, are you finding that you have not kept consistent gift information to allow you to do this?

Over the years, I have learned that there is a vast range in the quality of record management among nonprofit organizations. Here are three “touch points” that I have identified to support effective and efficient donor and prospect record maintenance:

• Gift history data and record generation
• Contact history
• Record management processes

Let’s look at each of these “touch points.”

Gift History. Whatever database your organization has decided to use, you need to have the ability to record basic gift information and then generate usable reports to support your fundraising efforts. This means that your software should allow you to write queries and sort by fields so you can produce the reports necessary to send out segmented mail appeals and to identify major donors and planned gift prospects. Reports that can tell you gifts by size, geographic area, the number and/or size of gifts during a specific period of time, appeal totals, comparison reports by year, and who donated to specific events or appeals, are critical to managing and growing your fundraising program.

Contact History. What is contact history? It is a record of information about each contact you have with an individual. This includes phone calls, personal visits and email communications. It also includes any information you may learn about a person that would be helpful and important to know as you build your relationship with that individual. Your ability to create strategies that might, for example, support a “moves management” approach to fundraising, depends on knowing as much as you can about your donors and prospects so that you can plan appropriate next steps. As we all know, development staff do not always stay in one place for long. Recording your interactions with donors will help you and future staff to recall important cultivation and donor history critical to fundraising growth.

Record Management Process. The best way I have found to manage the gift and contact history necessary to building donor relationships is to develop a process that works for you, and then follow that process. Here are three critical components of record management that I have found useful:

• Procedure Manual: This manual will contain all the procedures and formats you develop for entering data and generating donor and gift reports. It will enable you to function more efficiently when staff turns over or there is a temporary absence of data management personnel. Your procedure manual should be as detailed as you can make it and contain information about what data is entered into each data field, the way data is entered into each field, who is allowed to enter data, who is allowed viewing access only, who can generate reports, how often to back up data, and so on. Anything you need to know for the efficient administration of your database should be recorded in your procedure manual.

• Accuracy: This hinges directly on who enters the data and the skills they have to do the job effectively. Identify the person(s) responsible for entering data. They need to be highly organized and detail oriented. Whatever program you are using, you must enter the same type of information in the same manner in each field, or your queries will not be accurate. Remember: garbage in – garbage out. I need not say more! Having only one or two staff responsible for data entry will help to ensure consistency, and thereby accuracy.

• Training: Proper training of the staff involved in data entry and report generation is critical to an effective records management process. Staff should receive training from the software vendor or enroll in software classes that support the particular software being used. As software is upgraded, be sure your staff has the opportunity to get the additional training necessary to maximize software use.

Now ask yourself: If I were to have an unexpected meeting with a donor today, how complete and accurate is the information at my fingertips?