Romancing the Data

Over the course of my career working with nonprofits I've met only a handful of askers who LOVED working with fundraising data. Those who have, were and are better off for it.

If you don't particularly love working with data or even logging into the system, there are some simple things you can do to begin a courtship with your organization's fundraising data.

Here are three steps you can start with here, today, now to start your data romance.

1. Know how to pull a list of your prospects. Lists can be called different things depending on the software your organization uses. They may be called, among other things, a query, custom export, custom query, report, filter, or just plain ole list. No matter the name, know how to pull it on your own. If you don't know how to do this, ask one of your more data savvy teammates to show you. It won't take long and the return on your small investment of time will be huge.
2. Be sure you know how to run a year-to-date fundraising progress report directly from the system on your own. This may be in the form of a traditional report, a dashboard, or other type of output. Again, if you don't know how to do this, ask for help. If you have specific fundraising goals, create a version of the progress report filtered to the gifts you brought in.
3. Ask the person in charge of your database what you can do to help keep the data in your prospect portfolio as clean and up-to-date as possible. As most nonprofit data professionals spend about 60% of their time cleaning up data, I'm sure they will welcome this initiative.

These three easy steps will help you become a more data-centered fundraiser and encourage your budding romance with your donor management system.