7 Tips for Keeping Your Nonprofit Database in Tip-Top Shape
Imagine this: you’re asked to send out invites for a fundraising event to a list of high net-worth individuals. You turn to your donor database to put together the list, but there are three or four different people with the same name as your top prospect – and worst of all, you have no idea which addresses are up to date. Some of these records seem like they haven’t been touched in a decade. The old gifts officer used to keep her own notes, in her Rolodex – but she moved on to a different organization last month.
When you ask for guidance, you’re told that so-and-so from the board of directors always knew how get in touch with that person – except she termed out of the board months ago! You send an invitation to the address you feel most confident about, only to have it returned by the post office. The event’s only a week away. As a last-ditch effort, you try calling through the numbers on the various records for your prospect, only to hit disconnected lines and wrong numbers. When you finally reach your prospect, he tells you he’d love to come… if only he’d known about the event a few weeks ago, because that day is now totally booked. Yikes! Thousands of dollars in potential fundraising revenue, down the drain.
Does this sound familiar? Bad data can affect organizations of all types and sizes, but nonprofits can be hit the hardest. That’s because fundraising relies on the power of personal connection, and maintaining those connections is crucial.
Why does data matter?
Apart from missing out on potential fundraising dollars, bad data can cost your organizations thousands of dollars in mailing and printing costs.
According to a report issued by the United States Postal Service, mail that’s undeliverable as addressed due to “incorrect, incomplete, or illegible” addresses costs the postal service $1.5 billion a year, not to mention the $20 billion a year it costs the mailing industry as a whole.
That’s a lot of money. And it’s just a small slice of the pie. Bad data cost the US an estimated $3.1 trillion dollars in 2016 alone!
You may think a few wrong addresses here and there in your donor database don’t make much of a difference, but they do.
Many organizations still rely on the power of direct mail fundraising campaigns. And surprisingly, according to the Non Profit Times, direct mail is still as effective as email, and many donors are more likely to read direct mail than they are an email.
Furthermore, bad data slows down your organization’s entire workflow. According to the Harvard Business Review, the “hidden data factory” represents the bad data lifecycle within an organization – bad data gets entered, and different departments spin their wheels trying to correct and circumvent these inefficiencies, ultimately resulting in a lack of faith in the data itself.
In a nonprofit setting, this can play out in ways that can seriously damage the bottom line and the potential for greater impact and social good. Let’s say your nonprofit is a direct-services organization with several programs, including a pilot program serving a population your organization hasn’t traditionally targeted. In order to assess the impact of the pilot program, the board of directors requests that efforts are made to survey the program’s beneficiaries and follow-up with them six months later. – – Several volunteers are tasked with the survey. The volunteers mean well, but with differing skill sets, training levels, and schedules, it is easy for data to spread over several spreadsheets, often with unintentional errors. As a result, the follow-up data is in even worse shape.
This situation is the perfect storm for a “hidden data factory”. First, the program director doesn’t have the real feedback needed to improve the program and focus on how best to help its beneficiaries. Second, the grantwriter doesn’t have persuasive and credible statistics to back up the program’s impact and is therefore having trouble getting the necessary funding to keep the program running. Third, the marketing director doesn’t have the impactful information to use in fundraising and event materials. Fourth, the database administrator is frustrated over the messy survey spreadsheets and will need to spend valuable time formatting them for import into the database. Fifth, the executive director doesn’t have good numbers to present to the board of directors. And sixth, the board of directors lacks faith in the program data and as a result lacks faith in the program’s impact, leading it to less likely to focus its efforts on the program’s cause and less likely to invest energy and resources on future data collection measures… leading to yet another hidden data factory.
How can we avoid bad data?
The best way to avoid a bad data situation in your organization is to prevent it before it starts. Clean as you go! When you see mistakes on your database’s donor profiles, fix them immediately, and make serious efforts to prevent bad data from making its way into your system in the first place.
But it’s not always that simple. Almost every fundraising professional has jumped into a new position where the quality of the organization’s existing donor database leaves something to be desired. With concerted effort, you can clean your organization’s database, saving your organization valuable time and money, while setting yourself up for success.
7 Tips for Cleaning Up Your Nonprofit Database
- Go slow to avoid burnout. Tackling your data cleanup in small chunks will prevent you from feeling overwhelmed. Try dedicating a few hours each month towards data hygiene, or better yet, establish a weekly error check. Using tagging within your database will help you to better keep track of what’s already been done. If you look over twenty records weekly for inaccuracies and inconsistencies, in one year you’ll have increased the value of over one thousand records.
- Establish a data team within your organization. This provides an opportunity for stakeholders across the organization to discuss best practices and avoid information silos. Can you join forces to conduct a data audit and determine a plan of action?
- Train your team members and instill the importance of institutional knowledge. Having just one knowledgeable user of your database puts your organization at a huge disadvantage. If you rely on one power user of your database, what will happen if that person moves to another organization? Every organization experiences turnover, but not every organization is prepared for when it happens.
- Focus on what matters. If you’re pressed for time, privilege the data you interact with most and the data that makes the biggest difference when it comes to donor engagement. Updating your solicitation preferences should be your biggest priority. Take your “Do Not Call” list seriously!
- Consider investing in a USPS change of address update.
- Strategically clean out old contacts, old profile fields, old campaigns, or anything else in your database that doesn’t get used. Be smart about which records to keep and which to save. If a record is just a name without any contact information or giving history and hasn’t been updated since the Reagan administration, you know it’s time to cut it loose.
- Update the processes that are holding you back. Seek out solutions that integrate directly with your database to lighten the data entry load – and reduce the chance for human error.
