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QA-ing Your Giving Season

nonprofit data

Giving season is upon us. One-third of all charitable giving occurs in the last three months of the year. For most of you, that's a lot of data managing.

Make sure to keep up with all this great data as it comes in so your end of calendar year close out goes as smoothly as possible. How? Put some simple quality assurance measures into place.

Quality assurance, often referred to as QA, is a proactive approach that ensures your fundraising data meets basic standardization rules. Put another way, quality assurance procedures help make sure your fundraising data is clean and complete so when it comes time to produce reports or other types of outputs you have confidence in what you are handing off to others.

Try these three tips for staying on top of fundraising data quality assurance during your busiest time of year.

  1. Duplicates. With most fundraising systems now offering integration with online donation forms and more donors choosing to make their gifts online, it can feel like duplicate records have become an out of control mess. Be sure to check for and cleanup duplicates at the very least weekly. I recommend doing this daily. When the numbers of duplicate constituent records become too high, we tend to stress out and avoid them. The best thing you can do is tackle them as soon as they hit your system.
  2. Addresses. Have your constituents' addresses become a mess? Blank address lines, city, state, and zip code fields? If yes, set up an audit query or list to make sure addresses are being entered completely and accurately. If there is a team member who routinely misses these data, explain the importance of complete addresses and how it plays into your organization's ability to steward donors properly.  
  3. Gift Coding. Most modern fundraising databases have a version of campaigns, fund, and appeals. These may be called something different from system to system, but the purpose is the same. They give organizations an easy way to track gifts at three levels. Each time new gifts are entered into the system, be sure to confirm that all gifts have been entered with all three.

These quality assurance checks can be done quickly using built-in system features as is the case with duplicate constituent records and with a simple audit query or list as is the case with incomplete addresses and gift coding.

You may be well into your busy giving season, but it's not too late for some good ole QA-ing.

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