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Alive and Kicking

nonprofit data

Your organization's donor management system is a critical tool in creating meaningful connections with donors and prospects.

Any donor management system you work with or will work with is a relational database. Implied in the term "relational" is of course a relation of one thing to another. Put a different way, a communication is occurring. But what is communicating? What is connecting to create communication or relation? How does the connection occur?

The three organizing elements in any relational database are some version of records, tabs/tiles, and fields. These three components are what create connectedness in your database.

It can help to think of these elements in a hierarchy with records, the largest of them, sitting at the top. Tabs/tiles sit in the middle of the hierarchy as a means to further organize records. And fields, the smallest yet most pervasive organizing element, make up the base of the hierarchy.

Depending on the maker of your software the exact names may differ, but fields like constituent code or type, campaign, fund, appeal, and custom fields you may have built are used to create connections, to identify similarities among constituents in your database.

When building any type of output in your system - reports, lists, exports, mailings, etc. - you are saying to the database, "Hey database! Go to these record types. Then look on this tab. And then dive into these fields and do this thing I want you to do with what you find." Usually that thing you want the system to do is tally, count, report, export, list or otherwise group specific data to then take action with that data.

Meaningful connections are alive and kicking in your donor database. When we understand this connectedness, we are better equipped to harness its power.

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