Data and Tools

There's a big difference between your organization's fundraising data and the tools you use to work with them.

Data are just information you collect about your donors and prospects through the support they provide - time, talent, treasure. Raw, messy, unreadable, and incomplete are words many nonprofit data professionals use to describe the state of their fundraising data.

Data tools help you unearth and shape the story held within your data and present them in an organized, structured, readable, consumable, and visual way.

Don't confuse the two.

Your donor management system - your database - is like a toolbox. It contains the tools you need to shape, carve, whittle, build, hammer, segment, and frame the data living in its records, tabs, and fields.

Others tools outside the toolbox like Microsoft Power BI, Google Data Studio, and Tableau help you do the fine finishing work on your data story before presenting it to the world...or your boss.