GUEST POST // 4 Data Management Tips to Free Up More Time for Nonprofits
By Leigh Kessler of CharityEngine
As a nonprofit professional, you’re always looking for new opportunities to use your time wisely, create better systems, and maximize your mission impact. Maybe you’re trying to improve communication skills, create more effective fundraisers, or even hire new team members. The one place that almost every nonprofit has room to improve? Data management.
All organizations deal with data. Whether you’re using a massive spreadsheet to keep track of your donors or a fully built-out CRM system, you have access to information about your supporters. But too many organizations think to themselves, “I’m saving this information for the future” rather than considering how they can use the data in their current situations. This approach creates two major issues for that organization:
The nonprofit often doesn’t take an active role in organizing and cleaning this data.
The nonprofit isn’t using that information to maximize their time and strategies.
If you’ve found that you’ve plateaued in your fundraising efforts or relate to the issues above, there are opportunities to improve your organization’s data management strategies. In this guide, we’ll cover four key tips that you can use to make sure you’re maximizing your time as an organization by freeing up what’s currently spent on unoptimized data management strategies.
We’ll cover the following tips:
Start by analyzing where you are.
Create a process to ensure proper data hygiene.
Automate the data collection process where you can.
Consider additional opportunities to leverage data.
Without further ado, let’s dive into the first strategy.
1. Start with analyzing where you are.
It’s impossible to make a list of potential improvements for your nonprofit without first analyzing where you currently are in your own data hygiene practices. Therefore, to start maximizing your time and managing your data, you’ll need to take inventory of your current processes.
Begin by listing out the tools you use for data collection and defining your current processes. If you start this list with, “We use a spreadsheet to manage our donors,” you already have your first tip for success: Invest in a donor database.
CharityEngine’s CRM guide explains that a dedicated donor database “will store individual profiles for each of your donors, providing information about each engagement opportunity offered through your organization that donors have taken advantage of.”
If you’re already using a donor database to manage your data, start collecting items for your list of current processes and tools. Create this list by asking yourself questions like:
Where do we store information about donations made to the organization? How do we store that information? How often do we revisit that data to organize it? How much time does that take?
How do you track communication chains with supporters? Do you revisit this information frequently? How long does that take?
What type of reports do you compile on a regular basis? Why do you compile those reports? Who is responsible for it and how much time does it take them?
What types of activities do you use your already-stored data for at the organization?
These questions are the starting point to thinking about your current systems in place. And luckily, now is a perfect time to be thinking about it! Many organizations are finding that the absence of in-person event planning makes a pandemic crisis the perfect opportunity to analyze current systems and find potential solutions to problems or time-wasting activities.
2. Create a process to ensure proper data hygiene.
As we said before, if you’re simply storing data because you think it will become useful in the future, you might actually be making your future self more miserable.
How? Well, when you’re not actively using your data, you’re also probably not catching many of the inevitable mistakes and errors. Errors happen, even with the most effective and organized donor databases. And maintaining proper data hygiene is necessary to ensure you can readily use the information when it’s time to do so.
Let’s consider an example.
A nonprofit animal shelter focuses their efforts primarily on finding homes for stray or abandoned dogs in the community. However, they want to eventually expand their services to also work with cats. Therefore, they start collecting information about whether their supporters are cat or dog people. They send surveys and make notes in the CRM if they have conversations with people about their pets.
Well, Susie, one of the supporters, loves all animals. When she fills out the survey, she says she’s a dog person. But, in conversation with a member of your team, she mentions that she has three cats at home. Therefore, her profile says both that she’s a cat and a dog person.
Down the line, this nonprofit sends out two separate (but similar) emails, using this information in the CRM to create segments of “dog people” and “cat people.” If data hygiene practices are not addressed ahead of time, Susie might receive both emails because she’s marked as both in the CRM, which could lead to confusion on her part. Or, if the organization does organize their data ahead of time, they would delay the campaign in order to sort out other mistakes similar to the one made with Susie.
The best way to address data hygiene issues is to create ongoing processes that you keep up with to ensure consistently high quality, organized, and clean data.
Accudata’s handy data hygiene guide suggests nonprofits should create processes to:
Remove unnecessary information from the donor database.
Standardize formats for common information such as mailing addresses.
Verify supporter contact information on a regular basis.
Standardize any abbreviations for information in your database.
Watch for duplicate profiles or repetitive information.
When you create and document standard processes for maintaining information in your database, you’ll always be ready to take the next steps with your supporters, leveraging data where appropriate, and proactively address any issues. This proactive approach is one of the most sought after virtues by development directors everywhere.
This frees up the time that would have otherwise been spent retroactively cleaning your database, allowing your team to move forward with engaging supporters and fulfilling their expectations for addressing your mission.
3. Automate data collection processes where you can.
Once you know what systems you have in place and have developed a procedure to keep your data clean, start considering how your organization can automate data processes and free up even more time.
With most organizations there is likely something that your team does that can be automated and better dedicate the time to something else, even if it’s a very small task. Those small tasks can add up to a lot of saved time.
Consider the following examples:
When you have an effective marketing strategy, your organization reaches out on a number of platforms to reach your supporters. You must reach these individuals over email, phone call, text message, social media, etc. to create an impactful multi-channel marketing campaign for your fundraiser. Instead of stopping in the middle of tasks to post new updates on social media, automate the process and schedule these ahead of time. This allows you to frontload your work and focus on other activities you have planned.
If you use separate software solutions to collect donations, send emails, and collect data on your website, chances are your team is manually inputting or uploading data from one system to another. You can automate this process by investing in either all-in-one software or solutions that have integration agreements. This means the systems can speak to one another, automatically saving the data that you’ve worked so hard to collect throughout various campaigns and strategies.
When you developed your organization’s budget, it’s not likely that you planned for payment turnaround times that come with certain payment processors. However, you can automate this process by working with a fully integrated or natively hosted nonprofit payment processor, meaning that your organization will receive your funds that much faster (and safer if the solution is PCI-certified). That way, the money can be immediately reinvested in your mission and you don’t need to wait as long for the funds or manually deposit it into your working bank account.
Almost all nonprofit professionals have something on their plate that can be automated in some way to save some time in their daily lives. When you analyze your processes looking for these activities, they probably won’t be the massive projects that you can automate, but smaller individual activities that save a few minutes here and there. This time adds up and creates new opportunities for your organization.
4. Consider additional opportunities to leverage data.
Finally, once you’ve established processes to save time with automation and consistently maintain a clean database, you can focus on saving additional time by maximizing the use of your organization’s information.
Look for additional opportunities where you can leverage data to make the most of your organization's current strategies. For example, you might have an opportunity to recreate an email to better resonate with supporters, capturing their attention more effectively and leading to additional donations.
Let’s look at an even more specific example of how simply leveraging data can maximize your strategy, and help you raise more donations with less time:
Your organization is raising funds for your annual campaign. This is often a touchy subject for many fundraisers who find it difficult to raise funds for their overhead expenses. Therefore, they want to make the most of each and every donation that comes into the system. The development team realizes that there is also a major opportunity to collect matched donations from supporters’ employers.
This guide explains that $4 to $7 billion dollars in missed matching gift funds is left on the table each year as supporters simply don’t know about the opportunity. Therefore, the best way to collect these funds is to simply inform your eligible supporters about the opportunity.
They ask supporters for their employer information and use a matching gift database to determine which of the supporters are eligible. This additional information can then be leveraged to reach out to these supporters, discussing the opportunity, and doubling the supporter’s initial gift for the annual campaign.
In your own strategy, consider how additional data such as this can make a major difference in your campaign strategy to ensure you’re maximizing all of the opportunities available to your organization.
We never seem to have enough time to do the things that we feel we need or want to do. The good thing is that there is almost always hidden time in our schedules that we simply aren’t aware of! Consider your organization’s own data management strategies and how you can maximize your collection, organization, and leveraging of data to save time. Good luck!
This guest post was written by Leigh Kessler.
Leigh Kessler is VP of Marketing and Communications at donor management software platform CharityEngine and a frequent speaker on branding, fundraising, data and technology. He is a former nationally touring headline comedian and has appeared on numerous TV shows including VH1's "Best Week Ever", CNN's "Showbiz Tonight", Discovery Channel & Sirius Radio. He has overseen and informed research and branding strategies for some of the most well known brands in America.
