Clean Up Your Act: Donor Data Management for Nonprofits

Your nonprofit CRM is a powerful tool that can help you better understand your donors. By tracking engagement history and basic details about your supporters, you’ll know who to ask for financial support. And ultimately, a well-maintained donor database can help you build strong relationships with a greater number of people. For those who want to use their CRM to raise more money from existing supporters, we’re looking at why data hygiene is a big deal and sharing best practices that will help ensure your donor data gets—and stays—clean, leading to improved donor relations.

OUR top 3 reasons why CLEAN DATA matters:

1. Cleaner data gives you better, more actionable (and searchable) info.
2. Reports will be more accurate and reliable.
3. Mail merges will take less time.

Focusing on data hygiene offers a myriad of benefits to your organization. When you’re ready to segment your contacts for outreach, you’ll be able to reliably pull details of supporters who meet certain conditions, like donors who contributed in the past but haven’t donated in this calendar year. And when you’re ready to do outreach, you’ll have data that can be used to populate email campaigns and address labels. No longer will you have to scrutinize your data exports to ensure that supporters’ first names aren’t written in all caps, which can result in awkward email greetings like, “Dear ROBERT” (and break the illusion that emails are written individually and personally to each donor). You’ll also save the time that is often spent correcting address labels after a mail merge. While they might sound like small details, these can become massively time-consuming tasks as your supporter base grows!

managing your donor data

Making sure that decision-makers can use the donor data in your CRM requires planning and diligence. To get the most out of your donor data, you’ll want to standardize your internal procedures for data entry and management, clearly document these rules, and train your staff to use them. We know—it feels like we’re saying, “You should be brushing your teeth and flossing twice a day!” And, essentially, we are. But if you’ve ever had a cavity (or tried to clean up an Excel spreadsheet of 2,000 addresses all with different formats), you’ll understand that it’s worth the extra effort in the beginning.

Best Practices for Data Entry

If the donor data you put into your CRM is messy, your results will be, too.

To make sure all relevant donor data appears in reports and is properly formatted for mail merges, you should establish rules for how data is manually entered and set standards for formatting. For processes that are unique to your organization, you’ll need to formulate your own internal standards. You’ll also want to have rules in place for the entry and formatting of standard information, such as:

Names

• Decide how you will deal with formal first names vs. nicknames or preferred names. Designate a field for each and use them consistently.
• Set rules for capitalization and abbreviation. Avoid names in all capital letters; if a supporter enters their name using CAPS LOCK, these entries should be updated to reflect standard formatting.

Addresses (especially states)

• Determine whether to spell out or abbreviate the type of roadway: Street vs. St., Avenue vs. Ave., and so on.
• Set rules for entering apartment numbers: #2, Apt. 2, Unit 2, etc.
• Deal with one of the most common and pesky database inconsistencies by deciding whether to spell out or abbreviate the names of states. If you’re planning on using your donor data for mailing labels, we recommend using the two-letter abbreviations (like CA instead of California).

Donation dates

• For manually entered donations via check: should the donation date entered be the date on the check? Or the deposit date?

Spouses and Households

• Define a process for associating contacts who live in the same household. By grouping individuals who share the same address, you can avoid sending multiple pieces of mail to a single household.

Job Titles (Dir. Dr. etc.)

• Decide whether you will spell job titles out or abbreviate them. Create a list of standard titles and how they should be shortened if you plan to use abbreviations.

Phone numbers

• Standardize the entry of phone numbers: using parentheses (555) 555-5555, dashes 555-555-5555, or no punctuation 5555555555.

Beyond formatting, you’ll want to capture the same information for all of the contacts in your database. Anyone entering data should always include as much information as possible. Entering this information consistently means that your reports will give you a more complete picture of your donors.  Once you’ve defined your rules, compile them in an internal document and share it with everyone who uses your database. Communicating these expectations early will improve adoption and the quality of your donor data.

the importance of yearly audits and cleanups

Make the time to go back and standardize old records. 

Even with standards in place and trained staff, some discrepancies are inevitable. Set aside time each year to review existing records, make updates, delete bounced email addresses, and merge duplicate records. This will preserve the integrity of your data and make sure none of your donors fall through the cracks.

in conclusion

Whether it’s you or other staff and volunteers who will use donor data for your fundraising communications, making data hygiene a priority is vital. Committing staff time and resources upfront will ensure that the data in your CRM is accurate, actionable, and up-to-date. And if you’ve been sitting on a bunch of messy donor data, there’s no time like the present to clean up your act. The payoff will be evident as soon as you begin outreach for your next fundraiser!