I am not a fan of the phrase “arguably the biggest” to describe anything. If you have to modify your own statement with the notion that it is arguable, why make the claim? Yet I feel forced to use this statement to describe the magnitude of the change that has happened in fundraising concerning information. We need information about major donors: Where else do they give? What is their real capacity? What do we do that they might respond to? And we need other kinds of information: What is working in direct mail? What would make a corporation sponsor an event? How important is a good logo?

Today, we can find hundreds and sometimes thousands of pieces of information to answer these questions from our search engine. Then we have to decide which information we trust, which applies to us, has anything more recent happened, and so on. Filtering information, finding what we need, and not spending a lot of time with ideas and information we don’t need have become major challenges. It is easy to spend hours following one link to another, reading fundraising blogs and e-newsletters, participating in free or low-cost fundraising webinars, or doing prospect research. But successful fundraising means knowing what you need to know and putting together what you know so you can implement your fundraising plan: specifically, asking the right person at the right time for the right amount; scheduling the right event and inviting the people most likely to be interested in attending; inviting as many people as possible to join your organization as donors and keeping up with those donors; and using volunteers to the best of their abilities.

People in fundraising must always be clear about what they need to do and what tools they need to help them do it. In this chapter, we will explore those interrelated issues.

INFORMATION YOU NEED FOR FUNDRAISING

To build, maintain, and expand a broad base of individual donors, you need the following types of information. Each point leads to another series of questions, and questions will vary from person to person, but most fundraisers must be able to access the following:

• Data about current donors, including board members
• Information pertaining to prospects
• Information about strategies the organization will use to find more donors and prospects
• Current budget and current profit and loss statements
• Work plans for the ED and anyone else who is going to help with fundraising
• Evaluation of past fundraising activities
• Fundraising goals, benchmarks, and tasks for the current time period
• Useful how-to information (such as this book)

Every piece of paper and every file in your computer should be held up to this test: Will this item help us raise money or get something else we really need from someone? If yes, who and how? Then save it in the appropriate place. If the answer is no, delete it, throw it out, or forward it to another staff person whose work it will help.

FIND A GOOD DATABASE

The most important tool for entering, managing, and retrieving what you need to know about your donors is a database of some kind. There are hundreds of donor management systems in use, with new ones appearing frequently. Choosing one is a serious task that can take time, but not too much time or a lot of data will have been accumulated or lost while you search for just the right database. Of course, these systems are only as useful as the data entered and the uses you make of them.

When you are first starting out, you can keep track of donors on an Excel spreadsheet, but you are going to want to move to a fundraising database pretty quickly for a few reasons: first, it is easy to create reports with databases. Reports based on queries are easier to run in a database and is it much easier to mix, match, and re-sort data in a relational environment, as opposed to a static spreadsheet. Second, databases make forecasting future results a lot easier than a spreadsheet, particularly if there are a lot of variables. And finally, databases are more accurate and don’t depend quite as much on the skill of the user. A wrong number inserted into a spreadsheet can change everything—this is less likely to happen in a database. You can augment your database with paper files on donors; however, this soon becomes problematic as you have to look in two places for information. In general, record all that you can, and is appropriate, in your database.

Your database needs to be able to do at least the following seven functions:

• Hold a lot of names with addresses, phones, e-mail, giving history, etc.
• Store this information in the Cloud for easy access and backup in the event of a computer or software crash
• Sort fields quickly and easily
• Produce reports with simple queries (total number of gifts from the summer appeal, amount pledged versus amount received, donor renewal and retention rates, difference in specific fundraising costs, and income between this year and last year)
• Be able to interface with your e-mail system for sending e-newsletters, action alerts, and e-appeals
• Allow you to individualize letters and thank-you notes for different donor segments
• Respond to special requests, such as opting out of having their names traded with other organizations, not wanting to be called, or wanting to be asked only once a year. (In other words, Sally Vesey notes on her reply device that she only gives in the fall and does not want to be asked more frequently. When sorting for the spring appeal, her name will not show up on that list.)

When choosing a database, don’t spend a lot of money and make sure the tech support is good.

The best sources for information about databases are:

• Colleagues in similar sized nonprofits whose opinions you trust;
• Idealware (www.idealware.org/reports/consumers-guide-donor-management- systems) a useful website with frequent reports that help you decide what donor management system is best for your organization. They make recommendations that work for small organizations as well as giant ones; and
• TechSoup (www.techsoupglobal.org/) is another website with a lot of useful information that can help your nonprofit obtain different kinds of software for free.

Donor and prospect information, data used in creating reports, and much of the correspondence you do with donors will be stored, managed, sorted, and retrieved from your database. A good database with good data entered and sophisticated knowledge of how to use it will save you massive amounts of time. However, this does not happen by magic. It takes learning and re-learning the software and the discipline to take full advantage of the technology.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DONOR RECORDS

Systematically gathering information about donors and keeping thorough donor records is an important aspect of donor management. In doing so, keep the following three facts in mind.

KEEPING YOUR LIST IN SHAPE

Update your donor records on a regular basis. Don’t let more than ten names go unrecorded, or you will get careless with numbers and spelling. Watch for duplicate entries, particularly when you are going to use the list for a mailing. Donors dislike receiving more than one copy—whether by snail mail or e-mail—of your newsletter or mail appeal. A database program will not know that J.P. Miller and John Miller are the same person, or that Mary Jones no longer lives at 22 South Street and is now Mary Moondaughter on 44 North Street. Every so often, print out your whole mailing list and go through it looking for duplicates, spelling errors, incomplete addresses, and so on. (If it is very large, print it out in sections by alphabet or by number of records. Going through this is something that a detail-oriented volunteer can do.)

Don’t keep people on your mailing list who have never made a donation and whom no one knows. I have known many organizations that have mailings lists of 4,000 but donor lists of 700. When I ask what the other 3,300 people are doing on their list, they will say, “This is our outreach program.” But most organizations have no evidence that they gain donors from this outreach, or even that all of these people are alive or at the addresses on their records. Considering that it costs from $3 to $10 per entry every year to keep someone on a mailing list—presuming you send at least two paper newsletters and at least one paper appeal—you could be spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars keeping people on your mailing list about whom you know nothing. That same money could be invested in exploring other fundraising strategies or spent on programs that will attract more donors.

Because as many as one-third of the people on a list move in a year, and another third change their e-mail address every year, it’s important to know when the address you have is no longer accurate. For snail mail, you can get address corrections from the post office by printing “Address Correction Requested” on the outside envelope of all your bulk mail. You pay a certain amount for each piece returned to you, but the returns will have a forwarding address, if known, on them, which helps keep your list clean. Request address corrections at least once a year. Also, someone has to delete bounced addresses and correct e-mail addresses each time you send any communication.

YOUR FILING SYSTEM

Take time to organize your electronic and physical filing systems. To test your filing system, ask a friend or another staff person to come into your office and start naming things for you to find. It should not take you more than two minutes to find any piece of information—physical or virtual—that you are in charge of. If you can’t do that, reassess your system. Once your system passes this test, see how well it works for someone else. Suppose you were hit by a train: How obvious is your information setup? If it takes someone else more than five minutes to figure out where something is, your system is too mysterious.

Many otherwise neat people have sloppy virtual files, so give this problem extra attention. I know, because I am one of these people. Virtual files fool you because you don’t often notice how much room these are taking up—the “clutter” is invisible, so it is easy to let the information on your hard drive get out of control. I, who rarely handle a piece of paper more than once, will spend an hour scrolling through my files with the intensity of a mad scientist: Did I save it under “November” because it happened in November, or under “Special Events-Ideas-Fall Plans” or in “Docs-Fundraising-Special Events-November”? Why would I even have a filing system like that? Again, apply the standard “If I were hit by a train, could someone else find this?” Give it a name that makes some sense.

STICKING WITH IT

To help you stay on top of your files once you are organized, note somewhere you will see it, the one, two, or three things that will most help you stay focused on what to keep. Here is one person’s screensaver:

• Is it a donor?
• Is it a prospect?
• Could it lead to a donor or a prospect?

Another has this on a small Post-it on her screen:

• If in doubt, delete.
• After all, what is the worst thing that can happen?

Twice a year or so, have your whole staff clean up their offices, including files using this question:

• If this were my last day at work and I was sorting through my stuff, would I give it to the person succeeding me?

In our business, information is like food: we eat it, we serve it to others, we save it for a few days, but we don’t keep it permanently. It is useful for what it does for us, but is not really useful beyond being converted to energy, enjoyment, or, in this case, donors and donations. Seeing information in that light will let you be in control of it so that you can use it to do your work.