When you clean up donor data you get a better understanding of the individuals who support your mission, as well as identify broad patterns and trends. These insights can guide everything from your marketing strategy to how you plan your organization’s events.
This is why having a full constituent relationship management system (CRM), also known as a donor database, is such a big advantage to your nonprofit operations. However, it can quickly become overwhelming for your team to wade through the masses of information you’ve collected over the years.
Luckily, by implementing a few data management protocols and best practices, you’ll regain control of your donor data in no time. Let’s explore a few ways you can get started.
1. Set aside dedicated time to clean up donor data
Even after investing in top-of-the-line tools to gather your data, whether that means Salesforce’s primary offering, Nonprofit Cloud, or Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT, large amounts of untidy data can quickly snowball into a bigger problem.
You’ll need to invest a significant amount of time into your nonprofit data management strategy initially to sort out the usable information. Then, you’ll need to schedule regular, ongoing data checks to maintain your CRM in the long run.
As part of these checks, you’ll want to look at whether you’re holding on to excessive, redundant, or incorrect information, such as:
- Mistakes within donor profiles, like outdated contact info
- Duplicate profiles, or duplicate fields within profiles
- Lapsed donors
- Donors who have passed away
- Data entered in a non-standard way
The larger your database becomes, the more information you’ll need to dig through to draw useful conclusions. Regularly culling redundant or useless data from your database is the first (and often most effective) step in achieving ultimate data hygiene.
2. Consider integrating your tools whenever possible
To start out, most nonprofits track their key functions with a handful of piecemeal technology solutions, like: a database, a few peer-to-peer fundraising platforms, and a couple of marketing tools. While this may work for smaller organizations, it becomes difficult to manage multiple platforms once you’ve acquired a large volume of data.
This is why it’s best practice to integrate your existing nonprofit software into a unified technology stack where you can centralize data from several solutions in your CRM.
With your data all in one place, you will be able to:
- Build complete donor profiles
- Segment your donors into different categories for further insights
- Generate customizable reports to determine the success of individual campaigns
- Strengthen outreach with built-in donor communication tools that easily generate new engagement data
Many nonprofits wonder what they’ll do when their database needs extend beyond a robust CRM that is integrated with other platforms. In this case, nonprofit technology experts recommend data warehousing. This process involves consolidating data from several larger sources like CRM systems, fundraising software, financial databases, and program management tools.
With a data warehouse, all data points are processed and organized in the same way so information from different sources is easy to use. This allows your organization to make more data-driven decisions, which ensures your strategies are based on objective, reliable information and can lead to more effective outcomes.
When the time comes for you to set up a data warehouse of your own, consider turning to nonprofit technology consultants to take care of the process for you.
3. Empower donors with more control over their data
When giving to your nonprofit, donors enter their personal information into your system—including contact details, payment information, and even employer specifics. You trust them with this initial data entry, so why not trust them to update this information when those data points change?
Consider optimizing your online member center to allow donors to update their personal information, including:
- Contact information, including mailing address, email address, and phone number
- Newsletter preferences
- Recurring gift amount, schedule, and any billing preferences associated with this process
- Any peer-to-peer fundraising campaign pages they create for future campaigns
Giving donors access to edit their data can relieve your team of the need to manually verify the data in your CRM. Further, this ability empowers donors to take ownership of their interactions with your nonprofit and guide the scope of their participation. Self-service options are particularly useful for organizations that rely on active membership or volunteer programs.
4. Segment your key information for easier analysis
Once you clean up donor data and purge unnecessary information clogging up your database, you can organize your donors’ information for more efficient use.
By segmenting your donors by certain characteristics, you can more easily pull insights from the large database you’ve developed. You should consider factors such as demographics, communication preferences, past donations, previous event and program attendance, employer and business affiliations, personal relationships, general interests, and all past interactions with your nonprofit.
With this information, you can create segments such as:
- Geographic location: allows you to promote initiatives to the right audiences, such as marketing a fundraising event to members living in the town in which it is taking place.
- Average gift amount: provides an idea of how large of a donation to expect from different segments of your community, as well as what size of donation you should ask for to encourage increased giving.
- Workplace: helps you identify donors who work at companies with matching gift programs and other corporate philanthropy initiatives.
- Preferred donation method: allows you to promote specific methods to the segments most likely to donate in that manner, increasing the chance they will do so.
These segments represent just a few helpful classifications. Ultimately, you should segment your data into the categories that make the most sense for your organization. The main idea is to make sure your CRM platform allows you to customize and tag your donor profiles with any new useful data points you collect.
5. Create processes for uniform data management going forward
Creating a long-term process of uniform data management will inform all of your database entries going forward. This last step is crucial in preventing more data pileups in the future. If you can create a clear, standardized data entry process and communicate the best practices to your staff, you’ll prevent problems long before they occur.
Outline clear formatting and input rules for the following:
- Numerals, such as dates and phone numbers
- Titles, such as “Mrs.” and “Mr.”
- Empty fields, as in whether to leave them blank or mark with “N/A”
When not standardized, these elements can easily lead to errors and inconsistencies in your database, such as duplicate entries. In addition to deciding how your staff should handle commonly mistaken terms, you should also develop data hygiene processes around correcting any errors you discover, like:
- Immediately deleting invalid contact information as soon as it’s discovered
- Removing profiles for donors who haven’t engaged with your organization in two or more years
- Deleting any duplicate entries and merging data discrepancies between the two
- Scheduling regular database backups
After developing your data management best practices, you need to train your team on these new methods and standards. Many nonprofits prefer to work with a technology consultant to create their data hygiene processes and train their teams properly. Doing so allows you to tap into a professional’s expertise and get a third-party perspective on the health of your database.
The goal is a thorough and effective donor data clean up
Digital tools have greatly improved and streamlined nonprofit management, especially in the ways nonprofits can generate insights about their donors, but the sheer amount of data can get overwhelming if not managed correctly.
With the five strategies named above, you can conduct a thorough clean up of donor data to prevent any future confusion. Soon enough, you’ll have a neatly organized database teeming with actionable insights that can help you build stronger relationships with your donors and move your mission forward.
Charity Dynamics’ partner, DNL OmniMedia, helps nonprofits get a hold on their data management strategies, clean up their databases, and lay out plans for keeping them that way.